1 " Lost in hyperspace " : Psychological problem or bad design ? Yin

A pervasive criticism of hypertext systems is that users tend to lose their way. Although much work has been done to address this "lost in hyperspace" problem, it still remains unresolved, even accepted as an inevtaible feature. But using the "lost in hyperspace" problem as an example of usability problems, we argue usabilityproblems are not user problems. Once viewed like this, more appropriate solutions are applied to address it. We argue that some usability problems have been mis-classified as "psychological" and therefore are only palliated rather than cured. However, we show that there is much scope for new systems approaches that avoid such problems, and which offer considerably more creative ways of going about design of interactive systems.