How do people find information on a familiar website?

  • Authors:

  • Roy A. Ruddle

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 23rd British HCI Group Annual Conference on People and Computers: Celebrating People and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Previous research has investigated how people either navigate the web as a whole, or find information on websites of which they have little previous knowledge. However, it is now common for people to make frequent use of one site (e.g., their employer's intranet). This paper reports how participants recalled and navigated a familiar website they had used for 8--20 months. Sketch maps showed that participants' memory for the site's content and structure was very limited in extent, but generally accurate. Navigation data showed that participants had much more difficulty finding the region of the site that contained a piece of information, than then finding the information itself. These data highlight the need for directly accessed pages to be given greater prominence in browser history mechanisms and designers to make information regions memorable. Finally, two navigational path metrics (stratum and percentage of revisit actions) that correlated with participants' performance were identified.