The purpose of this study is to develop a set of prototypes of the web visual organizer, which enable learners to comprehend the web text better and to understand the web text structure better in the electronic document space.
For the theoretical underpinnings of the designing visual organizers for the electronic text, a variety of principles and strategies, techniques were examined. At the same time, the arguments on the human visual intelligence were carefully reviewed. As a result of these reviews, a set of principles on designing web visual organizers were suggested; visual abstraction principle, compatibility principle, and navigatability principle. Based on the developed principles, a set of prototypes were developed.
In developing the Prototypes of the Visual Organizer, 1) information representation styles(pictorial or verbal), 2) degree of abstraction(concrete or abstract), 3) visual verbal relationships(visual dominated or verbal dominated), 4) dimension of visual intelligence(interpretation or operation) were used as the identification dimensions of the potential prototypes. Among the possible combinations of the protypes, 5 typical and viable combinations were actually developed as protypes of the web visual organizer.
The results of this study seemed to demonstrate the positive potential of new style visual organizers in designing electronic text. By reflecting human visual intelligence principles, structural attributes, text structures, and the information of location, form and length of the web text were provided in the concrete visual form, in other words, in the visual organizer. The visual organizers seemed to provide vital information to the learners in e-learning situation. The research discusses the potentials of the visual organizers and the new research areas. Four specific recommendations for future research were suggested.