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)]

[img]
Preview
PDF
GwizdkaJ_SpenceI_WebLostness_IwC_2007.pdf

Download (501kB) | Preview

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

References

Ahuja, J.S., Webster, J., 2001. Perceived disorientation: an examination of a new measure to assess web design effectiveness. Interacting with Computers, 14, 15–29.

Berendt, B., 2002. Using site semantics to analyze, visualize, and support navigation. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 6 (1), 37–59.

Boechler, P.M., 2001. How spatial is hyperspace? Interacting with hypertext documents: cognitive processes and concepts. Cyber Psychology and Behavior 4, 23–46.

Botafogo, R.A., Rivlin, E., Shneiderman, B., 1992. Structural analysis of hypertexts: Identifying hierarchies and useful metrics. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 10, 142–180.

Chen, S.Y., Macredie, R.D., 2002. Cognitive style and hypermedia navigation: development of a learning model. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53, 3–15.

Chi, E.H., Cousins, S., Rosien, A., Supattanasiri, G., Williams, A., Royer, C. et al., 2003. The Bloodhound project: automating discovery of Web usability issues using the InfoScent_ simulator. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI’2003.

Clark, L., Ting, I., Kimble, C., Wright, P., Kudenko, D., 2006. Combining ethnographic and clickstream data to identify user Web browsing strategies Information Research, 11 (2) paper 249 [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/11-2/paper249.html].

Conklin, J., 1987. Hypertext: An introduction and survey. Computer 20, 17–41.

Czerwinski, M., Horvitz, E., Cutrell, E., 2001. Subjective duration assessment: An implicit probe for software usability. In: Proceedings of IHM-HCI 2001, Lille, France, September, 2001, pp. 167–170.

Dieberger, A., 1995. Providing spatial navigation for the world wide web. Spatial Information Theory. In: Spatial Information Theory – Proceedings of COSIT’95. Springer, Semmering, Austria, pp. 93–106.

Dieberger, A., 1997. A city metaphor to support navigation in complex information spaces. In: Spatial Information Theory – Proceedings of COSIT’95. Springer, Berlin, pp. 53–67.

Ericsson, K., Simon, H., 1980. Verbal reports as data. Psychological Review 87, 215–251.

Fox, S., Karnawat, K., Mydland, M., Dumais, S., White, T., 2005. Evaluating implicit measures to improve web search. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 23, 147–168.

Gansner, E.R., North, S., 1999. An open graph visualization system and its applications to software engineering. Software: Practice and Experience 30, 1203–1233.

Gwizdka, J., Spence, I., 2006. What can searching behavior tell us about the difficulty of information tasks? A study of web navigation. In: Proceedings of the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST 2006), November 2006, Austin, TX.

Herder, E., 2003. Revisitation Patterns and Disorientation. In: Proceedings of the German Workshop on Adaptivity and User Modeling in Interactive Systems, ABIS 2003, pp. 291–294.

Herder, E., Juvina, I., 2004. Discovery of individual navigation styles. In: Proceedings of Workshop on Individual Differences in Adaptive Hypermedia at Adaptive Hypermedia 2004 (AH2004).

Juvina, I., van Oostendorp, H., 2004. Individual differences and behavioral aspects involved in modeling web navigation. In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3196, pp. 77–95.

Juvina, I., Herder, E., 2005. The impact of link suggestions on user navigation and user perception. In: UM2005 User Modeling: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference.

Kellar, M., Watters, C., Duffy, J., Shepherd, M., 2004. Modeling information content using observable behavior. In: Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting.

Kelly, D., Belkin, N.J., 2001. Reading time, scrolling and interaction: Exploring implicit sources of user preferences for relevance feedback. SIGIR Forum (ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval), pp. 408–409.

Kelly, D., Teevan, J., 2003. Implicit feedback for inferring user preference: a bibliography. SIGIR Forum 37, 18–28.

Kim, H., Hirtle, S.C., 1995. Spatial metaphors and disorientation in hypertext browsing. Behaviour & Information Technology 14, 239–250.

Krahmer, E., Ummelen, N., 2004. Thinking about thinking aloud: A comparison of two verbal protocols for usability testing. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 47, 105–117.

Larson, K., Czerwinski, M., 1998. Web page design: Implications of memory, structure and scent for information retrieval. In: Proceedings Form CHI 98, pp. 25–32.

Masahiro, M., Yoichi, S., 1994. Information filtering based on user behavior analysis and best match text retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 17th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Springer Verlag New York, Inc, Dublin, Ireland, pp. 272–281.

McEneaney, J.E., 2001. Graphic and numerical methods to assess navigation in hypertext. International Journal of Human Computer Studies 55, 761–786.

Morrison, J., Pirolli, P., Card, S.K., 2001. A taxonomic analysis of what world wide web activities significantly impact people’s decisions and actions. In: Proceedings of CHI’ 2001. Extended abstracts (pp. 161– 162).

Needleman, S.B., Wunsch, C.D., 1970. A general method applicable to the search for similarities in the amino acid sequence of two proteins. Journal of Molecular Biology 48, 443–453.

Newell, A., Simon, H., 1972. Human Problem Solving. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

North, S.C., Koutsofios, E., 1994. Applications of Graph Visualization, pp. 235–246.

Oard, D., Kim, J., 2001. Modeling information content using observable behavior. In: Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, pp. 481–488.

Open Source, 2005. Pathalizer [Computer software].

Otter, M., Johnson, H., 2000. Lost in hyperspace: metrics and mental models. Interacting with Computers 13, 1–40.

Pitkow, J.E., Pirolli, P., 1999. Mining longest repeating subsequences to predict world wide web surfing. In: USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems The USENIX Association.

Russo, J.E., Johnson, E.J., Stephens, D.L., 1989. The validity of verbal methods. Memory and Cognition 17, 759–769.

Shih, P.-C., Mate, R., Sanchez, F., Munoz, D., 2004. Quantifying usernavigation patterns: a methodology proposal. In: Poster presented at the 28th International Congress of Psychology in Bejing, Bejing, 2004.

Smith, P.A., 1996. Towards a practical measure of hypertext usability. Interacting with Computers 8, 365–381.

Spink, A., Losee, R.M., 1996. Feedback in information retrieval. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 31, 33–78.

Tauscher, L., Greenberg, S., 1997. How people revisit web pages: Empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems. International Journal of Human Computer Studies 47, 97–137.

Wang, W., Zaïane, O.R., 2002. Clustering web sessions by sequence alignment. In: Proceedings of DEXA Workshops 2002, pp. 394–398.


Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item