Analysis of web page complexity through visual segmentation

  • Authors:

  • Guangfeng Song

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Information Science and Technology, Penn State Greater Allegheny, McKeesport, PA

  • Venue:
  • HCI'07 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human-computer interaction: applications and services
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Web pages have increasingly been used as the user interface of many software systems. The simplicity of interaction with web pages is a desirable advantage of using them. However, the user interface can also get more complex when more complex web pages are used to build it. Understanding the complexity of web pages as perceived subjectively by users is therefore important to better design this type of user interface. This paper reports an analysis of web page complexity through visual segmentation of web pages. 100 web pages were visually segmented by human participants as well as a computer program using Gestalt principles. The participants also indicated the perceived complexity of the web pages during the experiment. The result shows the perception of complexity is highly subjective but may be reliably measured. The number of blocks resulted from the three segmentation methods seemed to be irrelevant to perceived complexity. However, a composite metric that incorporate visual block information and other data of web pages seems to be promising in predicting the perceived complexity.