ABSTRACT
A quantitative analysis of a large collection of expert-rated web sites reveals that page-level metrics can accurately predict if a site will be highly rated. The analysis also provides empirical evidence that important metrics, including page composition, page formatting, and overall page characteristics, differ among web site categories such as education, community, living, and finance. These results provide an empirical foundation for web site design guidelines and also suggest which metrics can be most important for evaluation via user studies.
- 1.Daniel Berleant. Does typography affect proposal assessment? Communications of the ACM, 43(8):24-25, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 2.Jose A. Borges, Israel Morales, and Nestor J. Rodriguez. Guidelines for designing usable world wide web pages. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 96 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, volume 2, pages 277-278, 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 3.Giorgio Brajnik. Automatic web usability evaluation: Where is the limit? In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Human Factors and the Web, 2000.Google Scholar
- 4.CAST. Bobby. http://www.cast.org/bobby/, 2000.Google Scholar
- 5.Ed H. Chi, Peter Pirolli, and James Pitkow. The scent of a site: A system for analyzing and predicting information scent, usage, and usability of a web site. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 00 Conference on Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 6.Tim Comber. Building usable web pages: An HCI perspective. In Roger Debreceny and Allan Ellis, editors, Proceedings of the First Australian World Wide Web Conference AusWeb'95, pages 119-124. Norsearch, Ballina, 1995.Google Scholar
- 7.Flavio de Souza and Nigel Bevan. The use of guidelines in menu interface design: Evaluation of a draft standard. In Proceedings of IFIP INTERACT'90: Human- Computer Interaction, Detailed Design: Menus, pages 435-440, 1990. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 8.M. Carl Drott. Using web server logs to improve site design. In ACM 16th International Conference on Systems Documentation, Getting Feedback on your Web Site, pages 43-50, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 9.Peter Faraday. Visually critiquing web pages. In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Human Factors and the Web, 2000.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 10.Jennifer Fleming. Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience. O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, CA, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 11.Rodney Fuller and Johannes J. de Graaff. Measuring user motivation from server log files. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and the Web 2 Conference, October 1996.Google Scholar
- 12.Harry Hochheiser and Ben Shneiderman. Understanding patterns of user visits to web sites: Interactive starfield visualizations of WWW log data. In Proceedings of ASIS '99, 1999.Google Scholar
- 13.Melody Y. Ivory, Rashmi Sinha, and Marti A. Hearst. Preliminary findings on quantitative measures for distinguishing highly rated information-centric web pages. In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Human Factors and the Web, 2000.Google Scholar
- 14.Karen Kukich. Beyond automated essay scoring. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 15(5):22-27, September/October 2000.Google Scholar
- 15.Jonas Lowgren and Tommy Nordqvist. Knowledgebased evaluation as design support for graphical user interfaces. In Proceedings of ACM CHI'92 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 181- 188, 1992. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 16.Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton. Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites. Yale University Press, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 17.Nomos Management. WAMMI web usability qusetionnaire. http://www.nomos.se/wammi, 1999.Google Scholar
- 18.Jakob Nielsen. The alertbox: Current issues in web usability. http://www.useit.com/alertbox.Google Scholar
- 19.Jakob Nielsen. Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis, IN, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 20.The International Academy of Arts and Sciences. The webby awards 2000 judging criteria. http://www.webbyawards.com/judging/criteria.html, 2000.Google Scholar
- 21.Julie Ratner, Eric M. Grose, and Chris Forsythe. Characterization and assessment of HTML style guides. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 96 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, volume 2, pages 115- 116, 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 22.Jean Scholtz and Sharon Laskowski. Developing usability tools and techniques for designing and testing web sites. In Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Human Factors & the Web, 1998.Google Scholar
- 23.Rashmi Sinha, Melody Y. Ivory, and Marti A. Hearst. Content or graphics? an empirical analysis of criteria for award-winning websites. Submitted for publication, 2001.Google Scholar
- 24.Sidney L. Smith. Standards versus guidelines for designing user interface software. Behaviour and Information Technology, 5(1):47-61, 1986.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 25.Lincoln D. Stein. The rating game. http://stein.cshl.org/ lstein/ rater/, 1997.Google Scholar
- 26.Terry Sullivan. Reading reader reaction: A proposal for inferential analysis of web server log files. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and the Web 3 Conference, Practices & Reflections, June 1997.Google Scholar
- 27.Yin Leng Theng and Gil Marsden. Authoring tools: Towards continuous usability testing of web documents. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Hypermedia Development, 1998.Google Scholar
- 28.Harold Thimbleby. Gentler: A tool for systematic web authoring. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 47(1):139-168, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 29.Web Criteria. Max, and the objective measurement of web sites. http://www.webcriteria.com, 1999.Google Scholar
- 30.Xiaolan Zhu and Susan Gauch. Incorporating quality metrics in centralized/distributed information retrieval on the world wide web. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference, pages 288- 295, Athens, Greece, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Empirically validated web page design metrics
Recommendations
Evolution of web site design patterns
The Web enables broad dissemination of information and services; however, the ways in which sites are designed can either facilitate or impede users' benefit from these resources. We present a longitudinal study of web site design from 2000 to 2003. We ...
Statistical profiles of highly-rated web sites
CHI '02: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsWe are creating an interactive tool to help non-professional web site builders create high quality designs. We have previously reported that quantitative measures of web page structure can predict whether a site will be highly or poorly rated by experts,...
Web sites that work: designing with your eyes open
CHI EA '99: CHI '99 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsThis tutorial is inspired by our observations of users struggling with web sites and our consulting work with clients who face the many challenges of web site development. We've witnessed the effects of less-than-optimal web site design and the pain it ...
Comments