User centred evaluation of an automatically constructed hyper-textbook

As hypertext systems become widely available and their popularity increases, attention has turned to converting existing textual documents into hypertextual form. An important issue in this area is the fully automatic production of hypertext for learning, teaching, training, or self-referencing. Although many studies have addressed the problem of producing hyper-books, either manually or semi-automatically, the actual usability of hyper-books tools is still an area of ongoing research. This article presents an effort to investigate the effectiveness of a hyper-textbook for self-referencing produced in a fully automatic way. The hyper-textbook is produced using the Hyper-TextBook methodology. We developed a taskbased evaluation scheme and performed a comparative usercentred evaluation between a hyper-textbook and a conventional, printed form of the same textbook. The results indicate that the hyper-textbook, in most cases, improves speed, accuracy, and user satisfaction in comparison to the printed form of the textbook.