Experiences of Two Task Driven User Studies of Hypermedia Information Systems

We present two small scale user studies of hypermedia information systems: a hypermedia discourse system designed as an environment for researchers to summarize and share key ideas from research papers as a claim network, and a web browser plug-in which annotates terms related to a selected ontology on the fly. The first study investigated whether a claim network created by one user could help others learn about a domain. The second study investigated whether information extraction techniques for identifying extra domain terms enhanced the system. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these studies and the extent to which they achieved their goals.