Document icon bar for the support of authoring, learning and navigation on the Web: Usability issues

Currently, no approved standards exist to aid authors in designing usable multimedia documents. Sites exist on the Internet offering style guides which are often very detailed. In most cases, only the most determined of authors will wade their way through such sites for advice. Icon bars contribute a great deal to resolving usability problems. Standard Internet browsers have an icon bar, which this paper refers to as a ʹSite level icon barʹ due to the functions of its buttons-they control functions of the browser which do not belong to the viewed document but rather to the Internet sites visited. This paper argues that major usability problems (i.e. in relation to authoring and navigation of Web documents) can be overcome by introducing another type of icon bars, i.e. a ʹDocument level icon barʹ-for which the functions are directly relevant to the document being viewed, rather than to the site visited as in the first type. A programmable document level icon bar would enable the authoring of a range of standard navigational buttons which in turn would increase the speed of document transmission. Furthermore, widespread adoption of this icon bar will reduce the total burden on the bandwidth of the Internet as a whole. A prototype tool, called WebCheck, has been developed with a programmable document level icon bar to demonstrate this idea.