A user study of the design issues of propie: a novel environment for enhanced interaction and value‐adding of electronic documents
| Pages | 377-426 |
| Date | 01 June 2001 |
| Published date | 01 June 2001 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000007088 |
| Author | Chern Li Liew,Schubert Foo,K.R. Chennupati |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
A USER STUDY OF THE DESIGN ISSUES OF PROPIE: A NOVEL
ENVIRONMENT FOR ENHANCED INTERACTION AND VALUE-
ADDING OF ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS
CHERN LI LIEW, SCHUBERT FOO* and K.R. CHENNUPATI
{PH8598467, assfoo, asramaiah}@ntu.edu.sg
Division of Information Studies, School of Computer Engineering
Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798
In this paper, we present a proposed information environment
(PROPIE) for enhanced interaction and value-adding of electronic
documents (e-documents). The design of PROPIE was based on a
thorough user needs and requirements assessment in interacting with
information through well-documented findings, and a focus group
with twelve participants to elicit features that were deemed desirable
in future interactions. The design was also based on an earlier work
which reviewed the advancements in various user interface (UI)
technologies, visualisation and interactive techniques, and a
consideration of novel information structuring and organisation
techniques that pose important implications for the design of more
advanced UIs. Providing a suite of novel features and interactive
tools that can be flexibly combined, PROPIE allows users to apply
multiple novel ways to query intuitively and navigate information in
an e-document. The querying and browsing processes in PROPIE
are supported by various interactive and visualisation techniques.
Users work within a visually sovereign, integrated environment for
information gathering and organising, based on navigable,
fractional information objects that are also affiliated with rich
metadata and additional layers of value-adding information. A set
of interface mock-ups was developed to demonstrate the potential of
the environment in supporting the design of a new generation of
electronic journals (e-journals). We report here empirical results
from a study conducted to obtain representative users’ feedback
with regard to using PROPIE for interacting with e-journals.
Twenty-two participants from a variety of academic backgrounds
participated in the evaluation. Overall, PROPIE was found to have
the potential both for enhancing the user’s interaction with
information captured within e-journals and for adding value to e-
documents in various ways.
377377
*To whom correspondence should be sent.
Journal of Documentation, vol. 57, no. 3, May 2001, pp. 377–426
1. INTRODUCTION
In the words of Bolter [1], the demise of printed pages is inevitable. A similar pre-
diction is made by Odlyzko [2, p. 96]: ‘I expect that scholarly publishing will
move to almost exclusively electronic means of information dissemination. This
will be caused by the economic push of increasing costs of the present system and
the attractive pull of the new features that electronic publishing offers’.
There has indeed been a prominent upsurge of interest in the past few years in
the idea of escaping the static and rigid constraints of paper through digital alter-
natives. Many other people involved in e-journal projects, for instance, believe
very strongly that e-documents represent the pattern for the near future [3–5].
The reasons for the upsurge of interest in e-documents lie in part in the rapid
advances in direct manipulation (DM) technologies and interactive techniques in
the past fifteen years that have provided the foundation for much more elaborate
interactions with documents through graphical or visual interfaces [6, 7]. Another
factor is the shift to information becoming ever more digital, enabling, for
instance, more uniform interaction where all formats can now be stored and sent
correspondingly. Information is also making its structure increasingly accessible
as text and metadata formats move to SGML (Standard Generalised Mark-up
Language) [8]. The granularity of information packaging has also become vari-
able, shifting the model of documents from passive streams of characters to mal-
leable collections of meaningful objects. Likewise, the requirement to deal with a
massive electronic world and the emergence of distinct structures has led to frac-
tional, modular [9] layers [10] of information organisation. This paradigm shift
consequently results in the disaggregation of documents into separate compo-
nents [11] and the need to interact with information at many different levels.
Given these parallel developments, however, one of the remarkable features of
today’s e-documents is that few of them actually make use of the special features
of the electronic medium in novel ways to scholarly intellectual advantage,
except for distribution. Most of the e-journals, for example, publish articles that
could appear in paper journals. With a few exceptions, e-journals exist in a kind
of ghostly nether-world of academic publishing. Despite the propagation of tech-
nologies, new publishing tools and networked-based telecommunications, print
has remained the preferred medium of many, especially for ease of reading.
Hence, for e-documents such as e-journals to be truly valuable to users and to
contribute to scholarly communication, e-documents need to be more than a mere
electronic mimic of their print counterparts. They will need, as indicated by
Odlyzko [12] and Holoviak and Seitter [13], to be adding value in their online
forms and to go beyond the capabilities of printed pages. In contrast to the views
of some electronic publishing enthusiasts such as Bolter [1] and Odlyzko [2] who
argue that print documents will disappear within ten to twenty years, we view
electronic and print documents as partners in fulfilling a set of useful commu-
nicative functions. Each medium complements the other, providing a package
that is convenient for certain purposes and awkward for others (e.g. ease of read-
ing for print journals, and enhanced distribution, searching and collaborative
working for e-journals). The future of e-documents will likely be enacted through
electronic enhancements and value-added features to their print counterparts.
Many recent works [14–16] have indeed called for a breakthrough – indicating
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the need to exploit the potential of the electronic environment more fully to
improve further and enhance user interaction with e-documents such as e-journals
to enrich significantly scholarly communication.
2. STUDY OVERVIEW
Earlier studies of enhancing interaction with e-documents have mostly focused
on isolated solutions. Some of these works have looked into specifically the infor-
mation presentation aspect [9, 17] while others deal with providing access to
additional information via such means as hyperlinks [14, 18]. Some researches
into e-journals are also increasingly addressing the possibilities of transcending
the limitation of printed journals to include unprintable materials, such as multi-
media files that contain audio, video, animation and 3D graphics [13].
Many new interactive techniques, visualisations and applications have also
emerged as a result of the need to support a wide variety of basic information
manipulation and analysis tasks. Some applications support, for instance, creating
new information and visualising relationships among them [19]. Others support
controlling the level of aggregation of data and rapid filtering of data subsets [20,
21]. Still others support navigation through large data spaces [22–24]. A funda-
mental UI design question this study is addressing is how one can use the com-
plementary features of various visualisation, interaction and analysis tools in a
uniform and co-ordinated manner. Even for just these few sample activities for
instance, can a user create new data attributes with one tool, filter the same data
with another and visualise the resulting subsets with a third tool?
This study seeks to examine the broader problem of supporting the wide range
of information searching, analysis and communicating tasks involved in interact-
ing with e-documents within a single UI environment, using e-journals as an
example of e-documents. We aim to explore the potential and impact of an inno-
vative information environment where users can make seamless transitions in
their utilisation of multiple tools, visualisation and interactive applications to
meet their various needs, and ultimately to support the value-adding of these e-
documents. The study is carried out in three major stages:
1. a background and empirical investigation (needs assessment) stage – a
review and analysis of related works and elicitation of user needs and
requirements (through a focus group);
2. PROPIE conceptual design and prototyping stage – conceptual design of the
environment and the task scenarios for the subsequent empirical evaluation;
3. PROPIE evaluation stage – an empirical and formative evaluation of the
proposed environment by representative users.
3. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The overall objective of the study is to help make a new generation of e-docu-
ments a reality (see Figure 1). A central element of our study and approach is to
provide users of e-documents with multiple means for expressing their intentions
during various information-seeking tasks. ‘Multiple means of expression’ in this
context refers to visualisation and interaction techniques that are useful for
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