Especially in documents intended for new users who are unfamiliar with hypermedia or the topic which the hyperdocument deals with, the author of a hyperdocument may intervene in the user's interaction with the hypermedia system. Two of these methods are guided tours and text reminders.
Guided tours are paths designed by the author, leading from node to node. A reader wishing to go on a guided tour will thus follow the nodes in a predetermined order. Conceptually a guided tour is considered a linear organisation structure.
A mechanism for guided tours has been developed in NoteCards (Trigg 88). This allows the user to move along the path using buttons designed for this purpose. The figure below shows an opening screen from a guided tour in NoteCards which allows the user to choose among different ways of following the path.
Figure 6.1 Example of a guided tour. Taken from Marshal
and Irish (Marshall, Irish 89, p. 21). Do not bother reading the
text in the figure as this is only for illustration.
The guided tour mechanism may be used for instructing new users. It may be employed to teach new users how hypermedia information is structured, as well as to introduce users to a new hyperdocument.
Another application area is to use this as a presentation tool. An author may structure a number of nodes in a hyperbase to serve as a guided tour on a particular topic. The reader will then follow the author's ordering of the information, never having to consider which nodes to select. The author thus manages to place the focus on the information he wants to convey, as there is no possibility for a user to commit navigation errors. In this respect guided tours may also be considered as an orientation tool.
Text reminders are brief messages which pop up on the screen to remind the user about important information (Apple 89). These reminders may be shown as the result of various events. If the user must respond in a certain way to a question, the system may for example suggest where the user ought to continue. Text reminders may also appear if the user spends too much time before moving on, or if he does not respond to system questions within a given period of time.