Implicit Measures of Lostness and Success in Web Navigation

Gwizdka, Jacek and Spence, Ian Implicit Measures of Lostness and Success in Web Navigation. Interacting with Computers, 2007, vol. 19, n. 3, pp. 357-369. [Journal article (Paginated)]

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English abstract

In two studies, we investigated the ability of a variety of structural and temporal measures computed from a web navigation path to predict lostness and task success. The user’s task was to find requested target information on specified websites. The web navigation measures were based on counts of visits to web pages and other statistical properties of the web usage graph (such as compactness, stratum, and similarity to the optimal path). Subjective lostness was best predicted by similarity to the optimal path and time on task. The best overall predictor of success on individual tasks was similarity to the optimal path, but other predictors were sometimes superior depending on the particular web navigation task. These measures can be used to diagnose user navigational problems and to help identify problems in website design.

Item type: Journal article (Paginated)
Keywords: web navigation, web navigation graph, navigation path similarity, implicit measures, lostness, compactness, stratum, user studies
Subjects: L. Information technology and library technology > LC. Internet, including WWW.
C. Users, literacy and reading. > CB. User studies.
Depositing user: Jacek Gwizdka
Date deposited: 24 Nov 2009
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:15
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/13686

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