resources | yankelovich & hopper, 1992 [research interview]
Nicole Yankelovich and Mary Hopper, Passages from Personal Interview, March 6, 1992
Passage 1
Yankelovich: There were some things that we developed for the students and professors who were using Intermedia, based upon what was really missing for them. For example, we spent a lot more time than we ever anticipated working on the web view. That was just a problem that people had using the system. They had navigation problems, and we felt that was an area we needed to focus on.
Hopper: Do you believe you solved the problem?
Yankelovich: Definitely, yes. I think we spent more cycles on that one design problem than probably any other piece of the system.
Passage 2
Yankelovich: Having designed for both networked and stand alone systems, I think it is dramatically different. Thinking about issues like multi-user access opens up whole new possibilities for working together electronically which you can't possibly do with a personal machine. If you are not designing for the network, you're not taking advantage of the power which that complexity gives you. The real challenge is taking that complexity, and making it understandable, so that people can exploit it, but not be overwhelmed by it.
Passage 3
Yankelovich: Intermedia was enormous. We probably had 10 pages of ideas and implemented about 2 of them. We began with a fairly narrow focus about what we were going to do, and we based our priorities on who was willing to fund what. Then as we started building it, our ideas about what we could do increased dramatically. We did a lot of things that we never thought about when we started. It was really evolution. Having George Landow on the design team worked out really well for us, and helped us to prioritize a lot of the ideas about what we were going to do, because we had so many ideas, and not that many people to work on them,
We just couldn't do everything. A number of the features that were developed were ones that George Landow thought would be useful for his class. It turned out that a lot of those applied to other courses. We were also working with Peter Heywood, a biology professor. It was a good balance. We made sure we never implemented anything unless we confirmed that it was something that they could both use.
© Mary E. Hopper [MEHopper] |
MEHopper@TheWorld.com
[posted 01/01/01 | revised 02/02/02]