Visual metaphors to enhance hypermedia

The paper argues that whilst hypermedia systems potentially have a major role to play in education, there is the danger that they tend to engender cognitive and navigational overhead in their users, which in turn detracts from their educational value. A potentially valuable means of ameliorating this difficulty is to use metaphors to aid the user as they interact with the system. The value of metaphors in overcoming the problems of cognitive overloading and navigational overhead is discussed and an experimental study proposed to investigate the design and deployment of suitable metaphors in this context.