Mental models for web objects: Where do users expect to find the most frequent objects in online shops, news portals, and company web pages?

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIn interface development, it is crucial to reflect the users' expectations and mental models. By meeting users' expectations, errors can be prevented and the efficiency of the interaction can be enhanced. Applying these guidelines to website development reveals the need to know where users expect to find the most common web objects like the search field, home button or the navigation. In a preliminary online study with 136 participants, the most common web objects were identified for three web page types: online shops, news portals, and company web pages. These objects were used for the main study, which was conducted with 516 participants. In an online application, prototypical websites had to be constructed by the participants. Data analysis showed that Internet users have distinct mental models for different web page types (online shop, news portal, and company web page). Users generally agree about the locations of many, but not all, web objects. These mental models are robust to demographic factors like gender and web expertise. This knowledge could be used to improve the perception and usability of websites.

User-friendly locations of error messages in web forms: Put them on the right side of the erroneous input field

“…Amazon, Ikea and Overstock). Similar to Roth et al (2010), we used this list to determine the error message location in each online shop. Because some shops have different top-level domains (TLDs), they are listed twice and more.…”

How Influential Are Mental Models on Interaction Performance? Exploring the Gap between Users’ and Designers’ Mental Models through a New Quantitative Method

“…For example, Gregor and Dickinson [61] thought that good mental models could design good information structures. Roth et al [62] pointed out that different information structures had different mental models. However, hardly any studies have investigated the relationship between information structures and mental model similarity between users and designers.…”

Location of navigation menus in websites: an experimental study with Arabic users

“…The conventional design view [7,9] cannot explain why Arabic users value to a higher degree websites with a navigation menu located on the right-hand side, as there is no interacting with Arabic websites found that they tended to ignore banner ads appearing on the left-hand side [24]. These results concur with the study findings in that Arabic users value to a higher extent the visual elements located on the right-hand side of the websites, to the extent that they may even ignore those located on the left-hand side.…”

“…The argument of a conventional design considers that users have initial expectations about the location of particular objects in websites, and their performance may be hindered if designers include objects in unexpected locations [5,6]. Previous studies conducted with users from English and German speaking countries have shown that users expect navigation menus to be located on the left-hand side of the website, which is the convention in Western language websites [7,8,9]. Evidence suggests that this effect weakens after having spent some time on a website, because users can quickly accommodate to a design that differs from their expectations [6].…”