Presentation in Free-Form Space: Managing Ambiguity with Hypermedia Pathways While Supporting Ideation

Abstract

Traditional Slideware presentation tools (e.g. PowerPoint) suffer from the problem of premature formalism, which interferes with how authors develop new knowledge. Free-form spatial content organization can overcome this problem, by allowing users to express multiple, emerging relationships among content elements. Although its ambiguity fosters interpretation of relationships for both authors and audiences, the ambiguity will make presentation more challenging to perform. Therefore, we integrated hypermedia pathways with a free-form space to support presentations. We conducted a field study, addressing 158 users to understand authors’ experiences of creating content in free-form space, integrated with hypermedia pathways for presentation. Our findings show that this integration supports users in not only developing new ideas, but also in performing the presentations.