The relative effectiveness of hypertext and text

A series of two experiments was conducted. In Experiment 1, participant performance when using a hypertext electronic reference system was compared to using a conventional reference book. The links in this hypertext were based on the index entries in the corresponding 529‐page book. Specific topics and particular facts were located much faster and more accurately using the hypertext system than for the book. These advantages increased when participants searched for information that was either not included or referred to indirectly in the index. However, hypertext did not have an advantage over text on learning tasks. The conclusion was that hypertext is superior to text only for “reading‐to‐do” tasks similar to those a designer may perform when consulting a reference book. Experiment 2 compared user performance when the links corresponded exactly to the original index of a 545‐page textbook on ergonomics to performance when the links were generated by computer key‐word searches. Strong advantages were found in speed, accuracy, and subjective ratings for links based on the author's original index. It appears that these latter results can be attributed to the greater focus of the information provided by links based on the author's index. Users spent much less time browsing irrelevant sections of the book.