An outline view model for interacting with structured information systems

Abstract

This research describes a user interface model for interacting with structured information systems based on outline views. An outline view is a form of hierarchically organized hypertext whereby information can be expanded and contracted dynamically to show varying levels of detail. Unlike other user interface models for structured information systems, the model developed provides a single paradigm for performing all major information system tasks. These tasks include adding, editing, browsing, querying, and reporting. The outline view model presented by this research is generic; it can be applied to any kind of information that can be modeled as an entity-relationship structure. This includes relational, hierarchical, network, and object-oriented data models as well as many hypertext data models. This contribution is especially significant because it supports the deployment of information intensive applications with very little custom development effort. Given only the entity-relationship schema as input, an implementation of the outline view model would provide a complete information system interface. The user interface model is evaluated with usability testing. The primary goal of the usability evaluation is to determine the major usability problems related to specification of an outline view from a structured information schema. This is accomplished by an observational evaluation of ten subjects with a prototype implementation of the outline view model. In addition, usability data is provided by the performance statistics collected by the prototype including task time, error rate, and sequence of operation. The usability evaluation identified nine primary usability problems over the ten subjects. Overall usability of the model is very good based on the short learning time, low error rate, correctness, and subjective ratings of the evaluation subjects.