Journal of the American Society for Information Science
User interface directions for the Web
Communications of the ACM
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity
Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity
Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites
Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites
Hypermedia and Learning: Who Guides Whom? (Invited Paper)
ICCAL '89 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Assisted Learning
Webstar: a visualization model for hyperlink structures
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Influencing web-browsing behavior with intriguing and informative hyperlink wording
Journal of Information Science
Information structure and practice as facilitators of deaf users' navigation in textual websites
Behaviour & Information Technology
The technology profile inventory: Construction, validation, and application
Computers in Human Behavior
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The effects of link annotations on user search performance in hypertext environments having deep (layered) and shallow link structures were investigated in this study. Four environments were tested ---- layered-annotated, layered-unannotated, shallow-annotated, and shallow-unannotated. A single document was divided into 48 sections, and layered and unlayered versions were created. Additional versions were created by adding annotations to the links in the layered and unlayered versions. Subjects were given three queries of varying difficulty and then asked to find the answers to the queries that were contained within the hypertext environment to which they were randomly assigned. Correspondence between the wording links and queries was used to define difficulty level. The results of the study confirmed previous research that shallow link structures are better than deep (layered) link structures. Annotations had virtually no effect on the search performance of the subjects. The subjects performed similarly in the annotated and unannotated environments, regardless of whether the link structures were shallow or deep. An analysis of question difficulty suggests that the wording in links has primacy over the wording in annotations in influencing user search behavior.