Why structure and genre matter to users of digital information: a longitudinal study with readers of a web-based newspaper

Abstract

In an effort to understand the impact of designing for digital genres on usersâ mental representations of structure, a two-phase study was conducted. In phase 1, six expert news readers and a panel of HCI experts were solicited for input regarding genre-conforming and genre-violating web news page design, navigation, and story categorization. In phase 2, a longitudinal experiment with a group of 25 novice web news readers who were exposed to one of the two designs over 5 sessions is reported. During these sessions a variety of user data were captured, including: comprehension (recall, recognition), usability (time on task, accuracy, user satisfaction), and navigation (path length, category node hits). The between-group difference of web site design was signiï¬ cant for comprehension, usability, and navigation with the users of the genre-conforming design demonstrating better performance. The within-group difference of time was signiï¬ cant across these three measures as well, with performance improving over time. No interaction effect was found between web site design and time on comprehension or usability. However, a surprising interaction effect was found on navigation; speciï¬ cally the breadth of navigation (i.e. the number of nodes visited for two classes of tasks) increased over time more dramatically for the genre-violating group than for the genre-conforming group. By examining the changes in these data over time and between the two designs, evidence for the development of usersâ mental representations of structure was captured.