The design and evaluation of electronic books: the hyper-book experience

The author describes her experiences of designing, creating and evaluating electronic books based upon a model known as the 'hyper-book'. Hyper-books incorporate hypertext features (such as history facilities and links), paper book features (for example, visual appearance and layout) and some computer properties (such as searching). The design principles underlying hyper-books have been partially deduced from paper publishing and from existing electronic books. The evaluation work that has been undertaken involved two groups of users: computer experts and non-experts. Their performance was compared in terms of executing a number of browsing, searching and analysis tasks. The evaluation results lead to the conclusion that the hyper-book system was easy to learn and use by everyone and therefore it is appropriate to employ the book metaphor.