Scott Berkun

The popularity of the Internet has brought a relatively old technology, hypertext, back into the limelight. For may years, hypertext was studied by the HCI community, and many concepts and theories for using hypertext effectively were developed. Yet when the Internet rose in popularity, much of the research done by the HCI community into creating useful hypertext environments was largely ignored. Ted Nelson designed Xanadau, a planetary hypertext system, almost fifteen years before the Internet was even born. Yet his ideas and concepts have been largely ignored as well.

We all know that many of the sites on the Internet are poorly designed. But if we look more closely, we usually find that they are poorly designed hypertext environments, breaking some of the well known rules for good hypertext design. Why has the development of the Internet ignored so much of what the HCI community has already discovered? There are many guides to web publishing, and even some that discuss good hypertext design. Why have so few of these guides been provided by the HCI community? Why have we not led the effort to apply HCI principles to web design?

The HTML and HTTP protocols have now become the domain of the software industry. Extentions are added to these protocols to enable new levels of functionality and to support new products. Has the HCI community proposed any extentions to HTML to improve the usability of Web pages? It seems that if we are willing to convert our 20 or more years of researching hypertext environments to use, we should be able to propose some very useful extentions to web protocols. I would very much like to see this happen as a result of this workshop.

My direct interests

Background

B.S. Logic and Computation  (CS/HCI concentration)
Carnegie Mellon University 1994

Internet Usability/HCI specialist 	
Microsoft 1994-1995

Program Manager
Internet Platform Division, Microsoft
1995 to present