& 
.
We conducted an exploratory study to evaluate some factors relating to the suitability of integrated hypertextual glossaries for reading unfamiliar technical texts. Ours was a preliminary experiment investigating the importance of various factors on the usability of hypertextual glossaries. We aimed to determine if
Our results were most encouraging: users were satisfied with the tools; and although they took longer to answer questions about the texts they had read, reading with a hypertextual glossary took no longer than without one and it improved users comprehension of the text. Although our users were not willing to use the glossary's updating functions, since they knew that they would not benefit from them, many of them expressed an interest in using such a tool in their daily lives. We did not find any difference between the two types of glossary but that seems to have been largely and artifact of the experimental design. There are excellent prospects for more conclusive results in a longitudinal study.
We discussed two types of personal glossary tool (one tied to a document and one for use with every document a user might encounter) and suggest that future research should be about the human factors of the second type. There are still several basic features of glossary use that need to be understood if we are to create a tools that can truly augment human abilities. In particular we need to determine what happens when readers use an updateable glossary for a long time.
References for all works cited are available in a separate chunk.
& .