A study of navigational support provided by two World Wide Web browsing applications

This paper describes a usability study of the Hypertext navigation facilities provided by two popular World Wide Web client applications (also termed ‘browsers’). We detail the navigation tools provided by the clients and describe their underlying page retrieval models. We introduce a notation that represents the system states resulting from the user’s navigation actions in World Wide Web subspaces. The notation is used to analyse the client applications. We find that the client user interfaces present a model of navigation that conflicts with the underlying stack-based system model. A small usability study was carried out to investigate the effects of the clients’ browser behaviour on users. The study reveals that users have incorrect models of their navigation support, and they have little confidence in the application of their models when using the clients. The paper concludes with a description of future work and a discussion of implications for WWW page and client designers.