Chapter 1: An Introduction to Human-Web Interaction
Computer age prophets Vannevar Bush (1945) and Martin Greenberger (1964) wrote of the possibility that eventually man would invent a machine that could interface him with the seemingly infinite quantity of information that would be available to him. Bush arbitrarily named this machine the Memex, which he described as a desk with a cathode ray tube (or television) that displayed microfilm stored in the desk. Users could access the information with the push of a button or the pull of a lever. He predicted that users of the Memex would form “associative trails,” or links between the microfilm documents, about topics that are of interest. They would then share their newly formed associative links with other people who are interested in the same topic so that they too could find information easily.
Although the technology that Bush (1945) wrote about seems primitive by today’s standards, there are three strikingly accurate predictions in his essay. First, he predicted there would be a Memex, which is akin to what is now known as the desktop computer. Second, he predicted that the Memex could readily access data stored within it, which is one of the primary functions of today’s desktop computers. Finally, and most relevant to the current discussion, he predicted that Memex users would form and share a network of documents by associating similar documents. This concept of associative links between documents forming a network, which is shared by many users, is the essence of the World Wide Web.
Just as Bush and Greenberger predicted, the web affords us an opportunity to access and add to the world’s record. We can seek out information by following associative links between documents, or hyperlinks, rather than searching tediously through alphabetical lists. We can forge new networks of our interests and hyperlink them to other documents, or webpages, that are available to us. We can even share this network, or website, with the rest of the world, so that others can benefit from our efforts.
Bush (1945) predicted that this preternatural ability to follow hyperlinks in an associative network of webpages should allow man to “reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important” (p. 108). Have we reacquired this privilege of forgetting? The answer to this question rests on the assumption that we can find the desired information by using websites built by others.
One must wonder if websites designed by scientists/futurists like Bush or Greenberger would be useful or even intelligible for a chemist, paleontologist, psychologist or some other scientist with dissimilar knowledge and goals. Would the structure of the website (i.e. the website’s organization; how webpages are hyperlinked to form the network) be useful or usable or would usefulness and usability only be achieved for others with similar knowledge and goals? More specifically,
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would disparate knowledge bases direct people’s interactions through the information differently?
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with different goals in mind, would different people pick up different kinds of information?
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would different people learn different things even though they had the same information available?
With the human-web interaction research that is available today, these questions for understanding behavior on the web and website usability remain, at least in part, unanswered. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate these questions.
Before investigating the aforementioned issues, it was first important to place them within a cohesive framework that could then be populated with research findings and ideas. This framework is called the human-web interaction (HuWI) cycle and its structure was derived from a framework that was proposed by Neisser (1976) in his attempt to provide a link between behavior, perception, and cognition. Unfortunately, Neisser termed his framework “the perceptual cycle,” which is a name that does not describe adequately what is encompassed by the framework.
The perceptual cycle is a description of the human-environment system. It describes how one explores an environment (behavior), how that exploration leads to picking up information about the environment (perception), and how that information modifies what one knows about the environment (cognition). Similarly, a HuWI cycle should be a description of the human-web system. It should describe how a user of a website interacts with it (behavior) in order to pick up information about it (perception) and then uses that information to modify what is known about it (cognition). Because Neisser’s (1976) perceptual cycle encompasses behavior, perception, and cognition, and these are the processes that might describe how one uses a website, it appeared be a good starting point for developing a HuWI cycle.
Accordingly, the following chapter describes Neisser’s (1976) perceptual cycle, from which is derived a HuWI cycle. Finally, two experiments are presented that tested various premises of the HuWI cycle.
Document Last Updated December 31 1969 19:00:00.
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