1. Introduction

An important issue in designing web sites and other on-line information browsing and retrieval systems is how one manages large amounts of information so that users can readily find what they want and remember where it is when they return. Bederson and Hollan (1994) propose the use of a zooming interface to organize such large amounts of information. Their claim is that the "physics" of zooming interfaces allows scaling to larger information spaces in a way that the current metaphor of files, menus and windows can’t match. Their belief is that human-computer interfaces can take advantage of the natural human capabilities of spatial cognition, and that zooming interfaces are one approach that does so.

This experiment uses the Pad++ zooming interface to measure one aspect of spatial cognition. We are evaluating the hypothesis that smoothly animating motion when following a hyperlink between objects takes advantage of spatial cognition to improve user performance. Detailed hypotheses are presented in section 2.1, and possible refinements of the model are presented in section 5.3.

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