The Electronic Broadsheet

12 EVALUATION

The Electronic Broadsheet consists of approximately 7000 lines of C code. It handles all aspects screen-based news presentation from low-level typesetting to multi-page layout and user interactivity. Taking advantage of advanced display hardware, the Electronic Broadsheet introduces a rival to paper's dominance as the preferred newspaper presentation media.

As a part of the Newspace project, The Electronic Broadsheet is the first presentation module to institute dynamically updated news from an independent user modelling server. The clearly defined interface between the presentation module and news manipulation modules will make news scalable by easing the design of presentation modules for other display hardware.

The Electronic Broadsheet can be evaluated from several standpoints:

* The 2k monitor offers unprecedented visual bandwidth for the human interface. No application will exploit the bandwidth fully; the human being on the other side is not capable of digesting unlimited amounts of information. Instead, the bandwidth optimization must be judged with regard to the human user. A rich visual language is utilized in the design of the articles and the map, and I believe the result is functional as well as visually pleasing. However, the Newspace is only two-dimensional and the map is by definition also two-dimensional. Constructing a three-dimensional Newspace and a corresponding map could increase the maximum bandwidth. The Rooms project at Xerox PARC has been extended into the third dimension [Card, Robertson, Mackinlay 91].

* Not having a design background, I don't possess the vocabulary to criticize the visual design elements. Others will judge better than me, but designing text, articles, pages and nameplates has been one of the most challenging parts of the projects. The lack of colors in the data received form the news sources were substituted with colorful logos. Judging from the response from fellow students and faculty, personalized newspaper design should be available.

* From a computer resource efficiency the application scores poorly. There has been no time for optimization, and the heavy dependance upon system calls like fork should be reviewed.

* The ultimate evaluation of a newspaper is done by the readers. For the Electronic Broadsheet, the number of potential subscribers is strictly limited by the number of 2k monitors in the world; a number that is still very low. A formal user testing project should be performed to measure how the well Electronic Broadsheet performs versus paper-based news.

A newspaper will never be better than the quality of the articles presented; fancy design will not keep readers entertained for very long. As the Newspace project stands today it receives a high number of text articles, but few figures, and no photographs or video sequences. This tends to give pages a dull look which is hard to avoid without depending on locally produced news, like scanned maps and comics strips. In the future, emphasis should be put on widening the range of media sources.

Evaluating a project that has been on my mind for the last nine months is problematic; the bias is tremendous. The same mind is also able to come up with new ideas faster than it can implement them, and this creates a feeling of always lagging behind in an unfinished project. True, the application is not complete, and it can be improved in many ways, but it is at a point where it deserves to be presented.

12.1 Conclusion

At 2000 lines of resolution, computer displays start to compete with paper in size and legibility. When using the broadsheet-sized monitor, screen space management shifts emphasis from screen area conservation to screen overview, and opens for new metaphors in the human machine communication; the newspaper metaphor seems particularly appropriate.

Augmented by navigational clues and dynamic screen updates, the Electronic Broadsheet takes on paper-based news distribution; it handles all aspects of screen-based news presentation from low-level typesetting to multi-page layout and user interactivity.