This article presents an experiment with interfaces for glossaries
attached to electronic documents.
The authors argue that glossaries are a distinguished form of
annotation in need of study, and suggest relevant classifications of
such tools.
Using lessons garnered from earlier work on usability issues, the
researchers concentrated on users' needs and the potential for
glossaries to alter the ways people use electronic documents.
An automatic glossary tool and an editable glossary tool were
developed.
Both tools used the same definitions extracted from the text of
articles.
Unlike the automatic tool, the editable tool allowed users to alter,
delete and add new entries.
Both tools were evaluated to find out how useful they were to users
reading technical articles online.
Measures of speed, comprehension, and satisfaction were collected.
Forty users were given two online articles about selected health
conditions to read in a fully-randomized mixed design with each
participant completing two sessions (one with and one without a
glossary).
Although they accessed glossary entries regardless of which tool they
were given, users did not employ the specific features of the editable
glossary.
However, users found both of the tools useful and easy to
use.
Furthermore, users commented that if they knew that they could use
the glossary after the experimental session, or that they would need to
understand the terms for a test or in their job, then they would have
used the editable glossary more.
The analytical results showed that user performance improved without
increasing total reading time. The glossary tools were effective and
pleasing to users at no decrease in efficiency.
The experiment points the way for longer-term studies with
adaptable tools, particularly to help users unfamiliar with technical
documents.
An additional feature of this article is its formatting as a
hypertext.
The design of the hypertext is based on studies of how people
process written technical materials and is intended as a paradigm for
future publications.
This hypertext is written in Strict XHTML 1.0 with
CSS2
without any dynamic content.
However it has only been thoroughly tested with Netscape 7.1 for the
Macintosh.
The exact presentation will depend on the reader's browser
software and its configuration.
Detailed technical notes (discussing the link types, cursory testing,
coding tools, etc.) are in
Appendix A.
Our goal in both the investigation of glossary tools and the
hypertextual presentation is to make more useful and expressive
format for scholarly communication.
For information about the hypertextual structure, process used to
create it, and a call for comments please see Appendix B.
This article is a hypertext composed of several text chunks.
You may read the chunks in any order you wish but two recommended
orders are shown in the table of contents.
All of the chunks are linked to from the table of contents.
![[The acknowledgments contain XFN metadata (so the markup is `XFN Friendly').]](Fig/Stick/xfn-btn.gif)
