A development methodology for industrial hypermedia task support systems

Workers in today’s manufacturing environments have to cope with a greater variety of complex and rapidly changing tasks than ever before. To ensure consistent high quality of products and manufacturing processes, workers require constantly available source of information that serves as a task support and an aide-memoire for settings and task procedures. Hypermedia technology has been proven suitable for this purpose. However, developing industrial hypermedia task support systems (TSS) is different to developing conventional, non-industrial hypermedia applications. This research, therefore, aims to formulate the development methodology that can be used as a guidance to develop industrial hypermedia task support systems. The development methodology, incorporating formal design methods and design heuristics, has been used to develop a number of industrial hypermedia TSS. Both the hypermedia TSS and the methodology have been evaluated through a series of case studies. The thesis confirms that the success of the hypermedia task support systems is not only dependent on the usability of the system, but also on the quality of the content. Difficult and time consuming updating processes will cause poor accuracy and currency of the content, resulting in the users not being able to get the benefits from using it. The collaborative authoring environment that exists within the development methodology enables the content of the hypermedia task support system to be easily created and maintained, so as to ensure its usability. Compared to existing methodologies, the proposed methodology is more comprehensive and more suitable for developing industrial hypermedia systems. In addition to the formal approach typically found in ‘off-the-shelf methodologies, the methodology formulated in this research incorporates design heuristics that aim to improve an application’s coherence and to reduce users’ cognitive overhead, two important requirements for designing the user interface of industrial hypermedia systems.