Observing a User's Mental Model of an Informational Website

One category of Web application is an informational sites, which can be in the form of online newspaper, service manual, online electronic books, online help, online tutorial, and the like. One big target for designing a Web application in this category is to enable the user to search for information as quickly as possible. When user is doing his Web activity, he may develop some sort of mental model. This mental model could be about how a Website works, how the Internet works, how the information is structured on the website, or some other mental models related to given task. During his Web navigation to search for particular information, user may need some sort of wayfinding to ease his tasks. The existence of wayfinding cues could lead to the formation of user’s mental models. This paper observes the role of user’s mental model on his information search performance. A 2 x 2 factorial design is used to test the hypotheses. The first factor is the presence or absence of wayfinding cues, and the second factor is whether subjects are presented with the same Websites or different Websites during the experiment.

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