102 USING AND DEVELOPING HYPERMEDIA POINTS OF INFORMATION: LESSONS LEARNED Franca Garzotto, Luca Mainetti, Paolo Paolini Department of Electronics and Information Politecnico di Milano, Italy Abstract From the experience gained in evaluating several existing Hypermedia POls (Points of Information), and from our own development work in this field, we have identified some critical issues in designing this class of systems. This paper briefly presents these results, by outlining the major stages of POI design and by discussing their impact on the quality of the final system. These concepts are exemplified by presenting the design choices in HyperMilano, a full size hypermedia POI developed at the Multimedia Laboratory of Politecnico di Milano. 1. Introduction Since multimedia and hypermedia technology has become popular and largely available on the market, it has been intensively exploited for computer-based Points of Information (POls for short). This class of software applications have become more interactive, more sophisticated, and richer of impressive visual effects. However, if multimedia and interactivity make a POI more appealing for end users, on the other hand non necessarily they imply an improvement in quality, usability, and utility of the system. A bad use of multimediality and interactivity might be the main source of failure of an Information Point, or might largely reduces the advantages the users could take from consulting the system. The authors of this paper have informally conducted a small scale exploratory investigation on several hypermedia POls available in public sites in Europe and the US. - museums, scientific conferences, commercial exhibitions, fairs, banks, airports, train stations. A qualitative evaluation of these systems has been done, in terms of quality of layout, quality of navigation and interaction facilities, easiness of use and quality of the information "message". While a limited number of these systems were quite good, most of them were disappointing. After few minutes of playing, we simply felt lost and had to restart the session from scratch; after half an hour, we had seen a lot of video clips but had learnt almost nothing about the subject(s) of the POI, spending our time in trying to understand the rationale of the system, the meaning of the various buttons, and the actions we were doing with them. Some major problems were common to the latter POls: an excessive amount of active media - video, sound, animation - with shallow information content: active media were mostly conceived as technological effects to impress the audience. If it is true that the communication power of video, sound, and animation is typically higher that pure text, an excessive use of these media can be disturbing, confused and confusing, especially if the quality of their information content is low. A poor organisation of the material: the material was too fragmented in some parts, too long in other parts; the criteria adopted to organise it were obscure; many links did not have a clear meaning; links were not defined when the user would need them; there were to many links in some situations; the interplay of different media (e.g., the synchronisation of text and video) was inconsistent. Inconsistency in lay-out: lay-out elements with the same meaning - buttons standing for links of the same type or active areas on the screen standing for the same functionality - had different uses and representations in different nodes. Lack of asymmetry in fonctionality's: Some operation were available in some situations but were omitted in some similar cases, where instead a user would expect them (e.g., "stop" or "restart" were not provided on all videos). W. Schertler et al. (eds.), Information and Communications Technologies in Tourism © Springer-Verlag/Wien 1994