The Internet Sampler: A Mosaic-Based Museum Kiosk About the Internet

Conference Paper for the Second International Conference on Mosaic and the World Wide Web
Chicago, Illinois, October 1994
Simon A. Rakov, Sarnet Media Productions

Table of Contents

Abstract

The Internet Sampler is a Mosaic-based kiosk currently under development for the Computer Museum of Boston, and scheduled to go on exhibit in late October of 1994. As part of the Computer Museum's permanent exhibit on networks, the Internet Sampler will give museum visitors a chance to learn about the Internet, and to explore some of the features of the Internet, such as the World Wide Web, Gopher, and USENET News, in a controlled museum environment.

The Internet Sampler provides explanatory hypertext about the Internet for museum visitors, and also employs Mosaic's ability to display multimedia, such as color pictures, video, and sound. Mosaic's excellent communication capabilities make it a development platform uniquely suited to an exhibit about the Internet.

The Internet Sampler runs concurrently with a HyperCard stack, called "Control Mosaic," that makes the Mosaic program a more robust kiosk environment. The HyperCard stack disables the Mosaic menus, prevents users from altering the positioning of the Mosaic window, times out the exhibit to return to a set beginning after a certain period of idle time, and performs time-outs on helper applications. It also plays the musical soundtrack and provides an attract screen for the exhibit.

Simon A. Rakov is the lead software developer for the Internet Sampler. He designed the interface, wrote the text, created conceptual graphics, composed original music, and programmed all of the HTML for the exhibit. The final graphics were created by Anne Powers, and Benjamin Tremblay developed the HyperCard stack. David Greschler, the Exhibit Director of the Computer Museum, and Kristan Cardoza, Exhibits Research, participated in the conceptual design and provided invaluable advice and support.

Introduction

Introductory information about the Internet faces a challenge in merging descriptions of the network with actual on-line experience. If presented in print, an introduction to the Internet must ask potential Internet users to go out and connect themselves to the Internet; if placed on-line, as perhaps a list of Frequently Asked Questions or a World Wide Web site, information makes itself unavailable to people that are not connected. In contrast with printed and on-line formats, information about the Internet that is presented as a museum exhibit can couple descriptive text with a live connection to the Internet. A museum exhibit that lets visitors learn about and use the Internet can make the network accessible to a broad spectrum of people, from those who have Internet connections at home and at work, to those who don't have a computer at all. The Computer Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, is dedicated to educating the public about computers and technology, and sees great potential for an exhibit that gives museum visitors, especially novices, a chance to learn about and use the Internet.

The Internet Sampler is an interactive kiosk exhibit implemented by Sarnet Media Productions for the Computer Museum. It intends to educate museum visitors about the Internet by providing them with a taste, or "sample," of the Internet. The exhibit largely targets Internet novices, but experienced users may also be interested by its wide variety of information focusing on the function and implications of the Internet. Developed in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the Internet Sampler is intended to be displayed with the Macintosh Mosaic 1.0.3 World Wide Web client program.

Design

We designed the Internet Sampler to offer museum visitors a chance to learn about and explore the Internet. As a part of the Computer Museum's new permanent exhibit about computer networks, the Internet Sampler will be surrounded by colorful multimedia kiosks describing networks, as well as virtual reality displays depicting fly-throughs of computer network topologies. The interface of the Internet Sampler needed to be as bright, simple, and appealing as possible in order to fit in with the other dynamic parts of the exhibit.

Sarnet Media Productions designed the hypertext documents implemented in the Internet Sampler for clarity rather than complexity. Jakob Nielsen emphasized the necessity for easy-to-use, appealing museum hypertexts when he noted that

Museum systems require "walk-up-and-use" usability in the sense that users will not be willing to go through a special initial period of training to be able to use the system. Simple systems...without too many fancy navigational options are suited for this application. The need to pull the museum-goer into the hypertext information space also impels the use of very attractive initial displays (Nielsen 1990, 72).
The Internet Sampler is not intended as a literary hypertext, but rather as a museum hypertext, which offers the reader maximal usability and minimal confusion. We followed several of basic cognitive rules of hypertext, as outlined by Nielsen, Robert E. Horn and others. Nielsen encourages hypertext nodes that are "shorter than paper articles," and promotes using separate, subsidiary nodes for details (Nielsen, 163). Robert E. Horn advocates keeping what he calls "button clutter" to a minimum (Horn 1990, 46). He points out results of cognitive research that suggest short-term memory to be limited to "five to nine chunks" of information (82), and recommends hierarchical links for best usability (94). The Internet Sampler reflects the suggestions of these theorists in that the length of the text in each hypertext node is strictly limited to one screen, eliminating the necessity for scrolling and increasing reading speed. Links between subjects are minimized; buttons replace linked words wherever possible, and links are arranged in a hierarchy. The number of choices on any particular screen is limited to approximately nine buttons.

Development

The development process for the Internet Sampler included several stages, from a pre-prototype to a full prototype and testing period, to a second version, and ultimately, the finished product. For the pre-prototype, we divided the broad subject of the Internet into four categories, labeled "Who Uses The Internet?," "How Does The Internet Work?," "Internet History, Facts and Lore," and "How Do I Join The Internet?." These categories appeared as buttons on the first screen of the Internet Sampler, which we set as a local home page and named the "Main Menu." The first button on the Main Menu, "Who Uses the Internet?" offered a series of examples of important uses of the Internet, such as the NASA and Library of Congress World Wide Web servers, and the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) discussions that took place during the Persian Gulf War. After going through the examples, users were offered choices between reading about the Internet tools that made the examples possible, such as the World Wide Web, Gopher, E-mail, IRC, Multi-User Dimension (MUD), USENET and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), or reading about a number of different Internet-related issues, such as privacy, security, copyright, and traffic. If a user wished to read about a certain Internet tool, such as the World Wide Web, a description of that tool would appear, and the user would then get a chance to use the tool. Each description of an Internet tool connected live to the Internet. If a user chose to read about an Internet-related issue, a text discussing that issue would appear.

The "How Does The Internet Work," "Internet History, Facts and Lore," and "How Do I Join" buttons of the Main Menu were purely informational, and offered no live connections to the Internet. The "How Does It Work" button described the TCP/IP protocol, as well as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Telnet, which we considered to be the building blocks of other Internet tools and therefore appropriate subsidiaries to a section describing how the Internet works. Illustrated with examples, the FTP and Telnet descriptions did not connect live to the Internet.

The Main Menu's "Internet History, Facts and Lore" button discussed the history of the Internet and other related facts, including a description of the network's anarchic management and an account of the worm that almost brought the Internet down in November of 1988. The final Main Menu button, "How Do I Join," offered a shopping-list of questions for the potential Internet subscriber, then gave descriptions of the various ways to connect to the Internet, from a shell account to a leased line.

We revised the pre-prototype when it became apparent that not all of the Internet tools should connect live to the Internet. Certain Internet resources seemed too complex for many Internet novices, and in order to minimize the risk of crashes, the Museum wished to present the Internet Sampler exhibit on computers without keyboards. IRC, MUD, Telnet, FTP, e-mail, and even WAIS required keyboards and in most cases, a learning curve too steep for the short descriptions and even shorter attention spans given to a museum exhibit. We reduced them to examples that did not connect live to the Internet; as a result, the full prototype offered live connections only to the World Wide Web, Gopher and USENET. We implemented a change in structure for the full prototype: in the pre-prototype, the live connections to the Internet had been buried deep in the hierarchical tree, beneath a series of examples in the "Who Uses the Internet" section. These live connections were, we deemed, too important to be buried, so we moved them, along with the descriptions and discussions of Internet tools and issues, up to the Main Menu and placed them under a new, fifth button, labeled "Explore the Internet."

Testing

An independent evaluator tested the prototype with five category buttons on visitors to the Computer Museum. The testing found people to be satisfied, overall, with the exhibit in terms of its meeting their expectations. Surprisingly few, however, actually connected to the Internet, and many people felt that they did not have a good sense of what was available on the Internet. We had designed the "Who Uses The Internet" area to present examples of what was available on the Internet, but in separating it from the "Explore the Internet" category, we lost much of the illustrative qualities of these examples. In the testing, people did not click on the "Who Uses the Internet" button as often as we thought they might, so the separation of "Explore the Internet" from "Who Uses the Internet" ended up hampering the visitors' ability to judge what might be available on the Internet before using it. Furthermore, the testing found that the "Explore the Internet" button made actual exploration of the Internet too tedious for the visitors' attention spans. The "Explore the Internet" button led first to descriptions of Internet tools, then let visitors connect to the Internet, a setup which we thought would inform users and encourage them to try the tools that they had learned about. Instead, the descriptions turned out to be too long, and visitors ended up learning about the Internet tools, but not taking the time actually to use them (Tremblay 1994).

Redesign

The testing demonstrated that the exhibit would have to be redesigned to encourage people to connect to the Internet. We determined to do this by changing the Main Menu into a screen with two giant buttons, labeled "Find Out About the Internet" and "Go To The Internet." The new "Find Out" button led to the original "Main Menu," which remained as before except that the under-used "Who Uses The Internet" button was eliminated, and its examples placed in the "Explore the Internet" area as illustrations of what was available on the Internet. The second giant button, "Go To The Internet," led to the user choosing between three options for Internet exploration: the World Wide Web, Gopher, and USENET. The buttons for each of these three led to a brief description of the tool in question, followed by buttons that offered a series of Internet sites and newsgroups for visitor perusal. Each of the site buttons connected live to the Internet and allowed visitors a chance to use the tool that they had picked.

We soon discarded the two-giant-button solution, although it seemed the best way of directing the visitors' attention to the idea of connecting to the Internet. Unfortunately, the design compelled users to go back to the two-button screen, rather than the "Main Menu," every time that they clicked on the "Main Menu" button. Our decision to handle navigation by external HyperCard control (see below), and the limitations of the 1.0.3 version of Macintosh Mosaic combined to create this unsatisfactory sequence. HyperCard controlled the Internet Sampler's navigation through Mosaic's "back" and "home" buttons, such that a button labeled "Go Back" and controlled by HyperCard had the same effect as clicking on Mosaic's "back" button. Similarly, a HyperCard button labeled "Main Menu" replaced Mosaic's "home" button. The Main Menu button called up the Mosaic home page; if the home page were set to the actual "Main Menu" of the exhibit, everything worked beautifully. If not, then the home page, whatever it was, would appear, and confuse or annoy the user, who was expecting the Main Menu. The two-button introductory screen, in order to appear as an introduction, had to be set as the home page, and would appear, erroneously, every time that visitors clicked on the "Main Menu" button. This was intolerable, and caused us to remove the two-button introductory screen, restoring the Main Menu to the top, home-page level of the exhibit.

The Main Menu of the final exhibit offers five buttons to the visitor, labeled "How Does The Internet Work," "Internet History and Culture," "Go To the Internet," "How to Join the Internet," and "References and Credits." The first button includes all of the earlier material about TCP/IP, FTP and Telnet as well as the descriptions of Internet tools previously offered in the "Explore the Internet" section. The "Internet History and Culture" button offers all of the historical and factual information of the earlier "History, Facts and Lore," with the addition of the discussions of Internet issues that were also previously in the "Explore the Internet" section. "Go To The Internet," converted from the earlier giant button of the same name that evolved from the even earlier "Explore the Internet" section, now gives visitors a direct route to the Internet, via quick descriptions and multiple connections to selected World Wide Web, Gopher, and USENET sites. All three of these tools are now organized into categories, ranging from "Science and Health" to "Humanities" and "Fun Stuff," with up to six separate servers for each category. The USENET section's categories correspond mostly to the traditional USENET categories, such as computers and computer science ("comp."), research science ("sci."), social and cultural issues ("soc."), and alternative ("alt."). The number of USENET and Gopher sites was greatly expanded.

Sarnet Media Productions chose the Internet sites for the exhibit in accordance with several factors, including the interests of the Computer Museum, the relevance of the site or newsgroup to the topics discussed in the Internet Sampler and in the wider "Network Planet" exhibit, the importance of the site or newsgroup to understanding of the Internet as a whole, and the site or newsgroup's readability. Other important factors in site and newsgroup selection included entertainment level, perceived level of general interest, and in the case of World Wide Web and Gopher sites, clarity of design. The results of this selection process vary from the Computer Museum's new Web site, listed under the "Museums" category, to the Tango Server in Switzerland, listed under "Fun Stuff," and the new White House Web server, listed under "Government."

The last two buttons of the Internet Sampler, "How to Join the Internet" and "References and Credits," describe how to connect to the Internet, offer lists of books for more information, and indicate who helped to develop the kiosk. In response to requests, the "How to Join" section now includes a list of equipment needed to connect, along with a discussion of what one might want in an Internet connection and a table of connection options. The new "References and Credits" section leads to a "References" page, a list of books, articles and other resources that offer more information about the Internet, and a "Credits" page which displays credits for those who worked on the Internet Sampler project.

Content

The Computer Museum was particularly interested in the human element of the Internet, causing Sarnet Media Productions to select such humanistic network issues as privacy, traffic, pornography, flaming and access as topics for discussion in the Internet Sampler. As lead software developer for the Internet Sampler, I wrote the text, composed the original music, designed the interface, and selected the Internet sites for the exhibit, attempting to maintain at all times a balanced perspective between humanities concerns and technical information. I included additional content in the form of graphics and movies from the World Wide Web, and also gave "screen-shot" examples of Internet transactions for those tools that did not connect live to the Internet.

Anne Powers, a freelance graphic artist working for the Computer Museum, designed the graphics for the Internet Sampler. The variety of animals and other characters that appear in Ms. Powers' work aim to humanize the Internet, making it a more habitable place for those who are not immediately technically inclined. This emphasis on the human element of the Internet, with a lighter tread on the technical details, runs throughout the Internet Sampler.

The graphics, movies and music help to allay the fact that the exhibit has a great deal of text, due partially to the amount of subject matter that it needs to explain. The Computer Museum wished to create a kiosk that was a bit more of a "study station" than the other kiosks in the larger exhibit; a kiosk with a lot of other elements, especially audio, would have conflicted with the Computer Museum's plans for the space in which the exhibit is to be placed.

Implementation

The choice of HTML/Mosaic as a development platform was unusual for a museum exhibit; most Macintosh-based museum kiosk developers use multimedia scripting tools, such as MacroMedia Director or Claris HyperCard. In the case of the Internet Sampler, however, the traditional Director and HyperCard platforms seemed inadequate for the task of creating an exhibit that would allow visitors to connect to a wide variety of Internet resources, within a reasonable time and more importantly, within a reasonable cost in programming time.

Director and HyperCard are highly flexible programming environments that allow considerable control over many aspects of a kiosk exhibit, including graphic design, interaction, interface, and input/output. Both Director and HyperCard offer exhibit developers the flexibility of programming external commands, known as "XCMDs" and pronounced "x-commands," that greatly enhance the abilities of the original authoring tool. A considerable amount of public domain and shareware XCMDs exist for the HyperCard platform, making that environment more flexible than Director for some tasks.

XCMDs must generally be programmed in a powerful computer language, such as C++, that is more complex than the relatively easy-to-use HyperTalk and Lingo scripting languages of HyperCard and Director respectively. Due to the higher complexity of the programming task, the creation of XCMDs is labor-intensive. To save time, software developers frequently use commercially or publicly available XCMDs that they hope will simplify any necessary work.

XCMDs would be essential to any Internet exhibit project developed using HyperCard or Director. If the Internet Sampler, which allows visitors to interact live with several different Internet resources, were developed in HyperCard, the developer would need to obtain an XCMD that would emulate the Telnet program. Such an XCMD is commercially available, but once purchased, it would have to be scripted for each of the different Internet protocols to be used in the exhibit. Scripts that "spoke" the Gopher, USENET News (NNTP), and the World Wide Web (HTTP) protocols would have to be developed.

If the Internet Sampler were developed in MacroMedia Director, the development would be made more complex by the fact that interaction with the Internet implies processing a great deal of text, and Director's tools for handling text are limited. Director compels all communications with the Internet to be sent as messages through the Macintosh's serial port, and the routines required to perform that feat are awkward. To develop the Internet Sampler in Director, the Telnet XCMD mentioned above for HyperCard might have to be adjusted to work with Director. It would then need to be scripted for each Internet protocol. Ways of working around Director's difficulties with text would have to be found.

To avoid the difficulties engendered by attempting to program Internet interaction into HyperCard or Director, Sarnet Media Productions recommended to the Computer Museum that Mosaic, that jack-of-all-trades of Internet communications, be used as a development platform for the Internet Sampler exhibit. Use of Mosaic did not cast aside all difficulties in the programming of the exhibit, although it did reduce them considerably to a level more compatible with the Museum's budget. Mosaic easily handles live communications with most of the available Internet resources, including the high-profile Gopher, World Wide Web, and USENET resources. Mosaic does not, however, allow the same kind of sophisticated interface control that one would be able to program into a HyperCard or Director-based exhibit.

Designed as a World Wide Web client program targeted to a sophisticated network audience, Mosaic is a full-featured application, complete with menus and preferences. Such a program is generally unsuitable for a museum kiosk, which is targeted to novices. Mosaic would have to be altered or controlled in some way; if it were not, museum visitors would be able to unintentionally wreak havoc, by for example changing the size of the Mosaic window, closing the Mosaic window altogether, quitting the Mosaic program entirely, or hanging up the program in any number of ways. A Director or HyperCard-based museum kiosk could be scripted to return to the beginning of the exhibit after a certain period of idle time; Mosaic could not. Complexities also arise from Mosaic's use of external "helper" programs to display pictures and movies. These helper programs are not part of Mosaic, but are instead completely different programs, open to completely different kinds of mischief in the hands of the unknowing or malevolent visitor.

In short, the tremendous amount of interface control that would have been available by using HyperCard or Director as the development platform was not available within Mosaic. It was, however, possible, through the use of XCMDs, to make HyperCard control Mosaic. One programmer at the Computer Museum was an expert in using HyperCard to control other programs. He was enlisted to perform the task of making Mosaic visitor-proof, and developed a HyperCard application, called "Control Mosaic," which prevents people from clicking the mouse outside a designated area. This makes the Mosaic menus inaccessible to visitors, and prevents them from changing the size of the Mosaic window. Control Mosaic also manages all of Mosaic's helper programs, such as JPEGView, Sound Machine and Sparkle. When Mosaic activates a helper program, Control Mosaic locks that program's menus, and if necessary, times the program out after a certain period of time and returns Mosaic to the foreground. Control Mosaic also plays any Quicktime movies called by Mosaic, so that it replaces the Simple Player helper application. In addition, Control Mosaic presents a button bar at the bottom of the screen, with buttons labeled "Go Back" and "Main Menu." When the user clicks on one of these buttons, Control Mosaic sends a system message back to Mosaic that makes the latter program act as if one of the buttons on the top of the Mosaic screen had been clicked. The "Go Back" button sends an artificial mouse click to the backward button in Mosaic, while "Main Menu" sends a mouse click to Mosaic's home button. Other advanced interface features offered by Control Mosaic include a time-out that quits and restarts Mosaic after five minutes of idle time, an animated attract screen, and an original musical soundtrack which plays when the attract screen is clicked on by a museum visitor.

Conclusion

Mosaic and other graphical World Wide Web browsers offer a unique combination of multimedia, text, and communications capability. The Internet Sampler project demonstrates that Mosaic can be used effectively as a platform for museum kiosk development, especially for exhibits that communicate with material over the Internet. Mosaic supports the entire kiosk development process, from initial design to evaluation and redesign, and allows the creation of a sufficiently sophisticated, highly usable interface. Use of contemporary design principles for museum hypermedia help to create a successful Mosaic kiosk.

My experience with the Internet Sampler has helped me to compile the following list of ideal capabilities for Mosaic kiosk software:

The development of kiosk versions of Mosaic for the IBM PC compatibles is an encouraging step in the direction of meeting the above guidelines, although it does not solve the issue of robustness for the many museum developers that work on the Macintosh platform. HyperCard control of Macintosh Mosaic offers a powerful and relatively easy-to-use means of scripting control, such that Mosaic becomes a more robust museum kiosk.

Works Cited

Horn, Robert E. Mapping Hypertext. Lexington, MA: The Lexington Institute, 1989.

Nielsen, Jakob. Hypertext and Hypermedia. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1990.

Hartwell, William. "Internet Sampler Test Results." Unpublished report on usability testing conducted at the Computer Museum during August of 1994.

Biography

Simon A. Rakov is the founder and president of Sarnet Media Productions, an independent hypertext, multimedia and Internet consulting firm. A 1992 graduate of Vassar College, Rakov brings four years of hands-on experience to his work in hypertext and hypermedia. He has worked closely with hypertext theorists George P. Landow, Robert Coover and Michael Joyce, and was a Maguire and Kirshner Fellow at the University of Oxford in 1993, where he studied the relation of current developments in hypertext fiction to the development of the printed novel in the eighteenth century. He has presented work at several conferences, including ACM Hypertext '93 and the 1993 United Kingdom Conference on Computers and Writing. Rakov has been programming computers using a wide variety of languages and platforms for over twelve years.

Contact E-mail Address

srakov@tiac.net