Hypertext Engineering Environments Can Be Mod- Eled to a Certain Degree on Software Engineering Development Environments. for Example, Designing toward a Hypertext Engineering Environment Hypertext Design Environments and the Hypertext Design Process Figure 2. Bridging Bottom-up and Top-down Approaches

the conceptual hypertext data model and abstract navigational model [22] can benefit directly from software engineering approaches. Fundamental differences , however, make a pure transposition of techniques both difficult and inadequate. An important part of hypertext design concerns aesthetic and cog-nitive aspects that software engineering environments do not support. This article focuses on the hypertext 1 design task itself as a computer-supported activity. In it we provide guidelines for developers of hypermedia design environments to facilitate the user's design process. A hypertext design environment can support both formal hypermedia design techniques and the actual design process successfully. While we take advantage of object-oriented terminology to describe certain concepts, the lessons of this article apply to all formal design techniques. Thus we neither proscribe nor detail a formal design model. Instead we examine the general human-factor aspects of the design process to determine which features help designers most. We also enumerate the requirements hypermedia design environments have that other types of computer applications do not. This analysis arises from observing users and students during design tasks, and is grounded in sound and well-known results in cogni-tive science. It builds upon our experience in developing LIRMM's MacWeb 2 hypermedia development environment [14–16]. One may consider hypermedia design, as with any other 49 J o c e l y n e N a n a r d a n d M a r c N a n a r d Hypertext Design Environments and the Hypertext Design Process mproving the quality of hypermedia design and reducing its cost is an important challenge for the information industry. One way to tackle the problem is to provide hypertext designers with appropriate development environments. Hypertext engineering environments that provide sets of integrated tools boost designers' efficiency and effectiveness. 1 Hypertext and hypermedia are handled similarly in design. Both refer to organized sets of information linked by semantic relationships, and therefore are indistinguishable in this article. 2 MacWeb [14, 15] is a knowledge-based hypertext system developed at LIRMM since 1989. To avoid any confusion, note that it is unrelated to the WorldWide Web client developed later with the same name. We used the name MacWeb first (and have published articles referring to it that predate the WWW client). design activity, from two points of view or dimensions: • prescribed formal design techniques to produce the design • observations on how people actually conduct the design process Most …