Hypermedia Topologies and User Navigation

One of the major problems confronting users of large hypermedia systems is that of navigation: knowing where one is, where one wants to go, and how to get there from here. This paper contributes to this problem in three steps. First, it articulates a number of navigational strategies that people use in physical (geographical) navigation. Second, it correlates these with various graph topologies, showing how and why appropriately restricting the connectivity of a hyperbsse can improve the ability of users to navigate. Third, it analyzes some common hypermedia navigational mechanisms in terms of navigational strategies and graph topology. 1. PROBLEM DEFINITION Hypermedia is a set of nodes of information (the “hyperbase”) and a mechanism for moving among them. One important criterion for classifying hypermedia is the topology of the links that join different nodes together. The degenerate case is the traditional book, in which the nodes of information are paragraphs, and the topology is simply a linear chain. Much of the power of computer-based hypermedia comes from its abilit