In an effort to understand the impact of designing for digital genres on usersâ mental representations of structure, a two-phase study was conducted. In phase 1, six expert news readers and a panel of HCI experts were solicited for input regarding genre-conforming and
genre-violating web news page design, navigation, and story categorization. In phase 2, a longitudinal experiment with a group of 25 novice web news readers who were exposed to one of the two designs over 5 sessions is reported. During these sessions a variety of user data were captured, including: comprehension (recall, recognition), usability (time on task, accuracy, user satisfaction), and navigation
(path length, category node hits).
The between-group difference of web site design was signiï¬ cant for comprehension, usability, and navigation with the users of the
genre-conforming design demonstrating better performance. The within-group difference of time was signiï¬ cant across these three
measures as well, with performance improving over time. No interaction effect was found between web site design and time on
comprehension or usability. However, a surprising interaction effect was found on navigation; speciï¬ cally the breadth of navigation (i.e.
the number of nodes visited for two classes of tasks) increased over time more dramatically for the genre-violating group than for the
genre-conforming group. By examining the changes in these data over time and between the two designs, evidence for the development of
usersâ mental representations of structure was captured.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/105924 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Vaughan, Misha, Dillon, Andrew |
| Publisher | Elsevier |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Journal Article (Paginated) |
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