Since the early 1990s, usability research has guided development of web interfaces used to interact with content available on the Internet.... Show moreSince the early 1990s, usability research has guided development of web interfaces used to interact with content available on the Internet. Following these guidelines has resulted in web pages that in many characteristics are quite similar and are identified here as Conventional Web Interfaces (CWIs). An emergent genre of web interface, the Single Window Interface (SWI), differs in many ways from CWIs. Most importantly, SWIs differ from CWIs in the type of tasks expected of their users and in the visual strategies used to facilitate these tasks. Namely, SWIs facilitate open-ended discovery tasks by using strong visual cues to convey meta-information to the user and encourage both the exploration and perusal of content. This dissertation will demonstrate that the differences between SWIs and CWIs require revisiting current usability guidelines in order to determine how to guide future development of SWIs. If SWI visual strategies can be shown to be effective in conveying meta-information qualities to users, the groundwork will be prepared for future research investigating the effectiveness of these strategies in facilitating open-ended exploration and discovery within SWIs. These efforts will lead to more useful experiences for users of SWIs and inform the fields of technical communication as well as human-computer interaction and usability research, to name just a few of the affected fields of study. PH.D in Technical Communication, May 2013 Show less
