Which way now? Analysing and easing inadequacies in WWW navigation

Abstract

This paper examines the usability of the hypertext navigation facilities provided by World Wide Web client applications. A notation is defined to represent the user's navigational acts and the resultant system states. The notation is used to report potential, or 'theoretical,' problems in the models of navigation supported by three web client applications. A usability study confirms that these problems emerge in actual use, and demonstrates that incorrect user models of the clients' facilities are common. A usability analysis identifies inadequacies in the clients' interfaces.Motivated by the analysis of usability problems, we propose extensions to the design of WWW client applications. These proposals are demonstrated by our system WebNetwhich uses dynamic graphical overview diagrams to extend the navigational facilities of conventional World Wide Web client applications. Related work on graphical overview diagrams for web navigation is reviewed.

How to Build Modeling Agents to Support Web Searchers

“…Our behavioral data suggest that people rely on waypoints rather than on sequences of URLs to reconstruct their searches. This implies that displaying a complete history of URLs is not only redundant but potentially confusing for users (see also Tauscher andGreenberg, 1996, andCockburn andJones, 1996). We built the waypoint agent to extract likely waypoints from a user's history of interactions with the web to enable appropriate visualization of user trails.…”

Integrating back, history and bookmarks in web browsers

“…Second, because the underlying recency list can grow indefinitely, it is feasible for Back to work between sessions i.e., successive browser invocations and login sessions. Third, the temporal reordering algorithm means that users always see a temporally correct retracing of their page path using Back, which likely matches how people perceive Back to actually work [2], Yet one disadvantage of recency-Back arises if a user's goal is to navigate back up the tree to a parent hub rather than to a previously seen spoke page. Figure 4 The same navigational trace using a recency list.…”

“…Indeed, most browsers do provide revisitation support through various mechanisms: the Back and Forward buttons, history lists, bookmark facilities, and even site maps that graph the pages that a person has visited [2] [6].…”

“…Figure 1. Recency-based Back, history and bookmarks research suggests that recency is closer to how people think Back actually works [2]. Second, the stack-Back loses pages, while recency-Back does not.…”

“…Current systems do a poor job of communicating stack's tree-pruning behavior to its users [2], and most people actually believe that Back just returns sequentially to one's previously seen pages (this incorrect view is validated further in Section 4.1). This discord between how Back works and how people think it works is no surprise.…”