This article has a number of figures with long captions as well as sidebars. You may want to read those first. The body of the article has interesting discussion, especially regarding how the stack was developed (see section near the end), and regarding the problem of navigating in hyperbases. As such, this article is somewhat in the area of Human Computer Interaction, discussing how to build interfaces to hyperbases. That is an important tie-in for the course - we see how the structure of information in hyperbases, and the system support for access to that information, must both be properly managed if we are to have an effective interface. A particularly important problem is how to avoid getting lost in hyperspace and that must really be resolved if we work with large hyperbases. Ultimately, with wide area hypertext, we must provide effective solutions. You might analyze the other hypertext interfaces you work with in this unit along the lines laid out by Nielsen, to see how well these current systems perform.
Please concentrate in this article on the problems of navigating in hyperbases, and the suggested solutions. Try to understand what these are, by reading the relevant sections a few times.
If you are especially interested, you might follow the instructions on the first page to obtain the HyperCard stacks discussed, and then work with them as you read through the article.
For a newer exposition by Nielsen on hypertext interface design in the context of WWW, see his article about SUN Microsystem's web pages.