Evaluation of a hypermedia maintenance support application

A large hypermedia application has been developed to demonstrate the concept of factory wide hypermedia to support the maintenance of a major process line. As part of its development cycle, the performance of the software and its acceptance by the user community has been fully evaluated. The evaluation method considered in this paper focuses on the subjective opinion of the users and measured the ease with which users could retrieve the information required to perform specific tasks, and is considered suitable for other large industrial hypermedia applications. This research draws together standard evaluation techniques into a methodology for evaluating an industrial strength hypermedia application. The trials undertaken showed that the users were able to find the identical information in approximately one-third of the time when using the hypermedia system, over a paper-based system, which equate to a significant cost savings during unscheduled maintenance periods. # 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.