Our purpose is to investigate the effectiveness of knowledge-based navigation in a dermatology hypertext network. The chosen domain is a set of dermatology class notes implemented in Hypercard and SINS. The study measured time, number of moves, and success rates for subjects to find solutions to ten questions. The subjects were required to navigate within a dermatology hypertext network in order to find the solutions to a question. Our results indicate that knowledge-based navigation can assist the user in finding information of interest in a fewer number of node visits (moves) than with traditional button-based browsing or keyword searching. The time necessary to find an item of interest was lower for traditional-based methods. There was no difference in success rates for the two test groups.
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