This paper presents design considerations for the construction of advanced information environments, and a prototype interface that attempts to respond to them. The design considerations came from task analyses of information gathering activities, from changes in the global information environment, and from advances in humancomputer interaction. These led to a number of desired design properties that are guiding our prototyping efforts, including the system, NaviQue, detailed here. It is a visually rich environment for information gathering and organizing, based on a navigable, fractal structure of information, ubiquitous queriability, lightweight interaction with ad hoc sets, and information visualization. The resulting interaction paradigm smoothly integrates more than a half dozen synergies between querying, navigation and organization.
George W. Furnas, Samuel J. Rauch