Seamlessly Editing the Web

The typical process of editing content on the web is strongly moded. Authors are forced to switch between editing and previewing and publishing modes before, during, and after the editing process. This thesis explores a new paradigm of editing content on the web called seamless editing. Unlike existing techniques for editing content on the web, seamless editing is modeless, enabling authors to directly edit content on web pages without the need to switch between any modes. The absence of modes reduces the amount of cognitive complexity involved with the editing process. A software framework called Seaweed was developed for providing seamlessly editable web pages in any common web browser, and is shown that it can be integrated into any content management system. For the purposes of experimentation, the content management system WordPress was selected, and a plugin using the Seaweed framework developed for it that provided a seamlessly editable environment. Two experiments were conducted. The first study observed users with no or minimal experience with using WordPress, following a set of prescribed tasks, both with and without the plugin. The second study was conducted over a longer time period in a real-world context, where existing WordPress users were naturally observed using the plugin within their own blogs. Analysis of logged interactions and pre-questionnaires and post-questionnaires showed that, in both studies, the participants found the Seaweed software to be intuitive and the new way of editing content to be easily adaptable. Additionally, the analysis showed that the participants found the concept of seamless editing to be useful, and could see it being useful in many other contexts, other than blogs

Seamless web editing for curated content

In this paper we present a new framework for editing that we have called Seaweed (short for seamless web editing) which enables authors to directly edit content on web pages within any common web browser—much like a word-processor—without the need of switching between modes. There are numerous ways to utilise the technique. This article reports on work integrating it with blogging software to support the direct creation and editing of curated content, and its subsequent evaluation through two field trials

A spatial hypertext-based, personal digital library for capturing and organizing musical moments

We describe the design, development, and evaluation of a personal digital music library application designed to assist musicians in capturing, developing, and managing their musical ideas over time. The target user group is musicians who primarily use audio and text for composition and arrangement, rather than with formal music notation. The software design was guided by a formative user study which suggested five requirements for the software to support: capturing, overdubbing, developing, archiving, and organizing. This led to a spatial hypermedia approach forming the basis for the developed application. Furthermore, the underlying spatial data-model was exploited to give raw audio compositions a hierarchical structure, and-to aid musicians in retrieving previous ideas-a search facility was provided to support both query by humming and text-based queries. A user evaluation of the implemented environment indicated that the target musicians would find the hypermedia environment useful for capturing and managing their moments of musical creativity. More specifically, they would make use of the query by humming facility and the hierarchical track organization, but not the overdubbing facility as implemented

A user-centered design of a personal digital library for music exploration

We describe the evaluation of a personal digital library environment designed to help musicians capture, enrich and store their ideas using a spatial hypermedia paradigm. The target user group is musicians who primarily use audio and text for composition and arrangement, rather than with formal music notation. Using the principle of user-centered design, the software implementation was guided by a diary study involving nine musicians which suggested five requirements for the software to support: capturing, overdubbing, developing, storing, and organizing. Moreover, the underlying spatial data-model was exploited to give raw audio compositions a hierarchical structure, and - to aid musicians in retrieving previous ideas - a search facility is available to support both query by humming and text-based queries. A user evaluation of the completed design with eleven subjects indicated that musicians, in general, would find the hypermedia environment useful for capturing and managing their moments of musical creativity and exploration. More specifically they would make use of the query by humming facility and the hierarchical track organization, but not the overdubbing facility as implemented