Location: Hypertext Review / Approach to UI Design for Hypertext / User Interface Design Guidelines / Identify strategic choices Site Map

3.5 Identify all strategic choices

Strategic choices include user interaction with the system in order to accomplish a specific task. These can be treated as landmarks [Nielsen, 1990a]. Strategic choices might include overview requests (displays of summary nodes), structural and content query facilities, navigation mechanisms, editing tools, display options, audit trail mechanisms, linearization techniques, and backtracking facilities. The inherent nature of hypertext is that there is really no need for strategic choices. Any node or link in the entire network can be a strategic choice. In a true hypertext system each node should be self sufficient and complete. Also, the set of strategic choices need not be the same every time the user interacts with the system. For example, the user can directly access required nodes through query mechanisms. This feature must be available even without traversing the network. Hence, a query facility can be considered as a strategic choice. Strategic choices can also include an overview diagram of the template (its contents and links), the ability to find out from which master template a duplicate was created, the ability to edit the master template etc.