mSpace: interaction design for user-determined, adaptable domain exploration in hypermedia

Adaptive Hypermedia systems have sought to support users by anticipating the usersi information requirements for a particular context, and rendering the appropriate version of the content and hypermedia links. Adaptable Hypermedia, on the other hand, takes the approach that there are times when adaptive approaches may not be feasible or available and that it would still be appropriate to facilitate user-determined access to information. For instance, users may come to a hypermedia and not have a well-defined goal in mind. Similarly their goals may change throughout exploration, or their expertise change from one section to another. To support these shifting conditions, we may need affordances on the content that a solely adaptive approach cannot best support. In this paper we present an interaction design to support user-determined adaptable content and describe three techniques which support the interaction: preview cues, dimensional sorting and spatial context. We call the combined approach mSpace. We present the preliminary task analysis that lead us to our interaction design, we describe the three techniques, overview the architecture for our prototype and consider next steps for generalizing deployment.