Getting it across

Abstract

A clear and appealing screen layout is crucial to the success of on-line kiosk systems, public terminals that are connected to a network. This paper addresses the problem of developing such a layout, and provides several guidelines, drawn from traditional typography and Gestalt psychology as well as from hypertext authoring, and human-computer interaction. To identify how a kiosk system's primary task influences optimal layout, kiosk systems are classified into four basic types. The usability of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) 2.0 and 3.0 to write documents for these systems is discussed, and some alternative existing environments are presented.