World Wide Web usability: introduction to this special issue

This special issue arises out of a symposium entitled ‘‘The Missing Link: Hypermedia Usability Research & The Web’’, held at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute in May 1996 (Buckingham Shum, 1996). As the title suggests, we felt there was something missing between the vast amount of hypermedia and related human— computer interaction (HCI) research that has been conducted, and the most popular hypermedia system in existence—the World Wide Web. Certainly, the web community, by and large, seemed to be ignoring the hypermedia research literature and, as Santayana (1905) notes, ‘‘1hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’’. However, it was possible that our view was inaccurate or even that the web was sufficiently different to its predecessors to make earlier findings irrelevant. The symposium set out to explore such issues. The idea for the symposium was obviously timely, following closely after two similar but independently organized events in the US. A workshop (Instone, 1996b) held during the Hypertext 96 conference was structured around the questions: What hypermedia research has influenced the web? What hypermedia research needs to be implemented in the web? What issues has the web raised which should be researched further? Similarly, the CHI 96 conference included a workshop on ‘‘HCI and the web’’ (Instone & Pemberton, 1996), subsequently reported by Instone (1996a).