An empirical study on the recall of site map of home pages on the World Wide Web

  • Authors:

  • Kashif Hussain;Shazia Yasin Mughal;Francoise Anceaux;Sylvie Leleu-Merviel

  • Affiliations:

  • Laboratory of Communication Sciences, The University of Valenciennes & Hainaut de Cambréésis, Valenciennes, France and DREAM, Cognitive Psychology & Ergonomics;Laboratory of Communication Sciences, The University of Valenciennes & Hainaut de Cambréésis, Valenciennes, France;DREAM, Cognitive Psychology & Ergonomics, The University of Valenciennes & Hainaut de Cambré& Hainaut de Cambréésis, Valenciennes, France;Laboratory of Communication Sciences, The University of Valenciennes & Hainaut de Cambréésis, Valenciennes, LAMIH, France

  • Venue:
  • AIC'05 Proceedings of the 5th WSEAS International Conference on Applied Informatics and Communications
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In this article we describe an integrated view of home page structure for recall of information being a powerful concept for the users in information retrieval. We present the results of an experiment investigating the role of structured information in the recall of titles and sub-titles of the site map. We compare the recall of text information of the home page in terms of their hierarchical order at different levels, ascending / descending order, total number of headings recall and total number of levels recall and total possible hierarchical order pages using two types of the Web pages differing in structure of the site map only (structured vs. unstructured) and two types of users (high knowledge vs. low knowledge). All groups were asked to recall the site map of the Web site. The subjects showed improved recall performance for structured information site map page as compared to reduced recall for unstructured one. We argue that structured pages can lead to the construction of better recall process. We believe that the usability of Web tools must allow cognitive resources for navigation planning. The findings from this study indicate that Website developers should construct and provide a conceptual map, which gives a clear insight into the organizational structure of the whole Web site. The findings suggest that the structured site map is importance for both high and low prior knowledge subjects to know that how the ideas of the different document relate to one another.