The evolution of US state government home pages from 1997 to 2002

Abstract

We examined the home pages of the 50 US states over the years 1997–2002 to discover the dimensions underlying people's perceptions of state government home pages, to observe how those dimensions have changed over the years, to identify different types of state home pages, and to see how these types have changed. We found that three primary dimensions explain the variation in perceptions of home pages. These are the layout of the page, its navigation support, and its information density. Over the years, variation in navigation support declined and variation in information density increased. We discovered that four types of state government home page have existed continuously from 1997 to 2001. These are the ‘Long List of Text Links’, the ‘Simple Rectangle’, the ‘Short L’, and the ‘High Density/Long L’. To this taxonomy, two other page types can be added: the ‘Portal’ page and the ‘Boxes’ page. The taxonomy we have identified allows for a better understanding of the design of US state home pages, and may generalize to other categories of home pages.

Introduction

The design of Web home pages is a shared concern for HCI and MIS researchers. HCI researchers are interested in how people react to Web pages, including how they understand pages, how they navigate among them, and how they experience various page attributes. MIS researchers are interested in how organizations create Web pages to communicate and interact with people, including customers and employees.

Web designers and the organizations that employ them need to be concerned with Web page designs, and the designs of home pages in particular. The home page provides the first impression of a Web site. It can set a user's opinions of the site along many lines: Is the site useful? Is it easy to use? Is it the product of a professional effort?

Unfortunately, to date there exist few research based guidelines for home pages. This study investigates the history of home page designs in one organizational domain—state government. The historical analysis we present in this paper was motivated by the fact that an archive of Web pages, described in detail below, became available in late October 2001. We saw the availability of the archive as a means to trace the changing patterns of home pages and to see if there were lessons in those patterns. Intuitively, from our experiences with our own institutions, we knew that home pages have changed since the inception of the Web in the early 1990s. However, we wondered how those changes were manifested and whether changes might provide information about processes of Web development. To answer our questions, we selected as our focal point the home pages for the 50 US states. The advantages of this sample are that it is stable, not too large, and comparable in terms of purpose.

The study addresses several general questions.

• What types of home pages have designers employed?

• How have these types evolved?

• What user perceptual dimensions explain the existence of different home page types?

• How has the importance of these dimensions changed over time?

Answering these questions will provide value to both Web designers and organizations wanting to understand what types of pages have been used and how the types have changed.

The road map of this paper is as follows: First, it describes specific research questions (based on the general questions noted above) and briefly outlines the methods used to answer the questions. Then, these methods, which included a data collection phase and two analytic phases, are presented, including results of the analyses. The paper concludes with a summary of findings and suggestions for future research.

If we can understand the evolution of home pages, it will help us to clarify what has happened already and why what has happened might be important. Creators of home pages who have a better understanding of this history might use such understanding to improve communication with visitors to their sites.