Cultural Cognitive Style and Web Design: Beyond a Behavioral Inquiry into Computer-Mediated Communication

Numerous studies have identified links among culture, user preferences, and Web site usability. Most of these studies were reports of findings from a behavioral perspective in explaining how cultural factors affect processes of Web-related content design and use. Based on the research of Vygotsky and Nisbett, the authors propose a broader model, referred to as "cultural cognition theory," by which Web design, like other types of information production, is seen as being shaped by cultural cognitive processes that impact the designers' cognitive style. This study explores issues related to Web designers' cultural cognitive styles and their impact on user responses. The results of an online experiment that exposed American ¹ and Chinese users to sites created by both Chinese and American designers indicate that users perform information-seeking tasks faster when using Web content created by designers from their own cultures.     

Improving Web site design

Using quantitative measures of the informational, navigational, and graphical aspects of a Web site, a quality checker aims to help nonprofessional designers improve their Web sites. As part of the WebTango project, we explore automated approaches for helping designers improve their sites. Our goal is to create an interactive tool that helps steer occasional Web site builders away from bad designs and toward better ones - a "quality checker" tool, analogous to a grammar checker in a word processor. What distinguishes our work from most others is that this tool is based on empirically derived measures computed over thousands of Web pages. We converted these measures, which characterize the informational, navigational, and graphical aspects of a Web site, into profiles for a variety of site types. Our rudimentary design-checking tool uses these profiles to assess Web site designs; future versions will also suggest design improvements     

Understanding Web home page perception

A home page is the gateway to an organization's Web site. To design effective Web home pages, it is necessary to understand the fundamental drivers of user's perception of Web pages. Not only do designers have to understand potential users' frame of mind, they also have at their choosing a stupefying array of attributes – including numerous font types, audio, video, and graphics – all of which can be arranged on a page in different ways, compounding the complexity of the design task. A theoretical model capable of explaining user reactions at a molar level should be invaluable to Web designers as a complement to prevalent intuitive and heuristic approaches. Such a model transcends piecemeal page attributes to focus on overall Web page perceptions of users. Reasoning that people perceive the cyberspace of Web pages in ways similar to their perception of physical places, we use Kaplan and Kaplan's informational model of place perception from the field of environmental psychology to predict that only two dimensions: understanding of information on a Web page, and the involvement potential of a Web page, should adequately capture Web page perception at a molar level. We empirically verify the existence of these dimensions and develop valid scales for measuring them. Using a home page as a stimulus in a lab experiment, we find that understanding and involvement together account for a significant amount of the variance in the attitude toward the Web page and in the intention to browse the underlying Web site. We show that the informational model is a parsimonious and powerful theoretical framework to measure users' perceptions of Web home pages and it could potentially serve as a guide to Web page design and testing efforts.     

An approach for supporting distributed user interface orchestration over the Web

Currently, a lot of the tasks engaged by users over the Web involve dealing with multiple Web sites. Moreover, whilst Web navigation was considered as a lonely activity in the past, a large proportion of users are nowadays engaged in collaborative activities over the Web. In this paper we argue that these two aspects of collaboration and tasks spanning over multiple Web sites call for a level of coordination that require Distributed User Interfaces (DUI). In this context, DUIs would play a major role by helping multiple users to coordinate their activities whilst working collaboratively to complete tasks at different Web sites. For that, we propose in this paper an approach to create distributed user interfaces featuring procedures that are aimed to orchestrate user tasks over multiple Web sites. Our approach supports flexible process modeling by allowing users to combine manual tasks and automated tasks from a repertoire of patterns of tasks performed over the Web. In our approach, whilst manual tasks can be regarded as simple instructions that tell users how to perform a task over a Web site, automated tasks correspond to tools built under the concept of Web augmentation (as it augments the repertoire of tasks users can perform over the Web) called Web augmenters. Both manual and automated tasks are usually supported by specific DOM elements available in different Web sites. Thus, by combining tasks and DOM elements distributed in diverse Web sites our approach supports the creation of procedures that allows seamless users interaction with diverse Web site. Moreover, such an approach is aimed at supporting the collaboration between users sharing procedures. The approach is duly illustrated by a case study describing a collaborative trip planning over the Web.     

Web site designs: Influences of designer's expertise and design constraints

Nowadays, much research examines both the cognitive difficulties encountered by web site users and the development of ergonomic guidelines for designers. However, few studies examine designers’ cognitive functioning while designing web sites. We defend the idea that determining the difficulties web site designers encounter is necessary to better support their design activities, especially in making web sites easier to use. We present an experimental study that demonstrates that the designers’ levels of expertise (novice and professional) as well as the design constraints that clients prescribe influences both the number and the nature of constraints designers articulate and respect in their web site designs. Based on our study findings, we suggest ways to better support web site designers.     

User satisfaction from commercial web sites: The effect of design and use

We empirically investigated the effect of user-based design and Web site usability on user satisfaction across four types of commercial Web sites: online shopping, customer self-service, trading, and publish/subscribe. To this end, a Web-based survey questionnaire was assembled, based on previously reported instruments for measuring user satisfaction, usability, and user-based design. Three hundred and fifty-nine respondents used the questionnaire to rate a collection of 20 popular commercial Web sites.Data collected were analyzed to test four hypotheses on the relationships among the attributes examined. The Web site attributes were also plotted on bi-dimensional perceptual maps in order to visualize their interactions. The two techniques yielded the same result, namely that trading sites are the lowest rated and that online shopping and customer self-service sites should serve as models for Web site developers. These findings are especially useful for designers of electronic commerce (EC) Web sites and can aid in the development and maintenance phases of Web site creation.     

多语言Web网站的结构与实现方法

简化多语言Web网站服务的管理与开发。在实践中,管理与开发多语言网站的大部分工作是保持网站的各种信息之间相互独立。在开发与管理多语言网站的过程中有许多与人相关的角色,如设计人员、实施人员（如程序员）、系统管理员、翻译人员与用户等角色。按照这些不同的角色对网站的各种信息进行严格分类,并保持在同一个网站中这些分类后的信息相互独立,也就是说负责翻译的人员不需要看到脚本语言,如JavaScript。同样,图形设计人员也不需要精通多种语言,也不必在多种语言环境中工作。从以上方面论述如何设计及实现多语言网站。     

Integrating Physical and Digital Interactions on Walls for Fluid Design Collaboration

ABSTRACT

Web designers use pens, paper, walls, and tables for explaining, developing, and communicating ideas during the early phases of design. These practices inspired The Designers' Outpost. With Outpost, users collaboratively author Web site information architectures on an electronic whiteboard using physical media (sticky notes and images), structuring and annotating that information with electronic pens. This interaction is enabled by a touch-sensitive electronic whiteboard augmented with a computer vision system. The Designers' Outpost integrates wall-scale, paper-based design practices with novel electronic tools to better support collaboration during early-phase design. Our studies with professional designers showed this integration to be especially helpful for fluidly transitioning to other design tools, access and exploration of design history, and remote collaboration.     

The MurMur project: Modeling and querying multi-representation spatio-temporal databases

Successful information management implies the ability to design accurate representations of the real world of interest, in spite of the diversity of perceptions from the applications sharing the same database. Current database management systems do not provide representation schemes that preserve each perception while fully supporting their diversity and maintaining their consistency. This is a major hindrance for building an all-embracing view of the world while serving multiple applications, whether it is by developing a single database or by providing transparent access (e.g., via the Web) to several heterogeneous data sources (that would typically hold a great diversity of stored representations). This paper reports on results from the multiple representations and multiple resolutions in geographical databases project,¹ funded by the European Commission under the 5th Framework Programme. The objective of the project has been to enhance GIS (or DBMS) by adding functionality that supports multiple coexisting representations of the same real-word phenomena (semantic flexibility), including representations of geographic data at multiple resolutions (cartographic flexibility). The new functionality enables a semantically meaningful management of multi-scale, integrated, and temporal geo-databases.     

Scaling Web sites through caching

A large jump in a Web site's traffic may indicate success, but this increased interest could turn into a nightmare if the site is not prepared to handle the bigger load. Site resources (processors, storage boxes, load balancers, LANs, and the like) could see their utilization rise to levels that generate increasingly long response times. Eventually, one of these resources - the so-called bottleneck resource - will reach 100 percent utilization, pushing the site's throughput to its maximum point. When a Web site becomes overloaded, customers grow frustrated with long waits and rejected requests. This situation can lead to an undesirable loss of site-generated revenue and may even tarnish the reputation of organizations relying on Web sites to support mission-critical applications. In this article, I discuss how caching technologies can improve Web site performance and scalability. I'll provide some simple quantitative expressions to let designers understand the most important trade-offs.     

Web designers and web users: Influence of the ergonomic quality of the web site on the information search

Despite rapid growth in the number of web sites, there is still a significant number of ergonomic problems which hinder web users. Many studies focus on analysing cognitive processes and difficulties experienced by web users, but very few are interested in web designers’ difficulties or in comparing their respective activities. Towards this end, the two experimental studies presented in this article compare the strategies developed both by professional web designers and (novice vs. experienced) web users while searching for information on web sites of varying ergonomic quality. More precisely, we investigated whether web designers can effectively use their own strategies as web users when designing web sites. We presented a comparison of novice web users, experienced web users and professional web designers searching behavior and cognitive load when using ergonomic and non-ergonomic web sites. In addition, we asked web designers to predict the strategy used by novice web users. Based on the results obtained in the two experiments, we conclude that web designers are not able to predict strategies of novice users and do not behave like novice users. Consequently, ways for supporting web designers in developing a user-centered activity are necessary, and certain ways are suggested at the end of this article.     

Automatic Integrity Checks for Remote Web Resources

Existing tools for automatically detecting Web site defacement compare monitored Web resources with uncorrupted copies of the content kept in a safe place. This can be an expensive and difficult task, especially when working with dynamic resources. In contrast, the Goldrake tool uses sensors and alarms to automatically monitor remote Web resources' integrity. Such a framework could help designers build services to inexpensively monitor multiple Web sites, which could be very attractive for small, budget-limited organizations that depend on the Web for their operation     

Evaluating Web software reliability based on workload and failure data extracted from server logs

We characterize usage and problems for Web applications, evaluate their reliability, and examine the potential for reliability improvement. Based on the characteristics of Web applications and the overall Web environment, we classify Web problems and focus on the subset of source content problems. Using information about Web accesses, we derive various measurements that can characterize Web site workload at different levels of granularity and from different perspectives. These workload measurements, together with failure information extracted from recorded errors, are used to evaluate the operational reliability for source contents at a given Web site and the potential for reliability improvement. We applied this approach to the Web sites www.seas.smu.edu and www.kde.org. The results demonstrated the viability and effectiveness of our approach.     

Understanding Representation in Design

Representing computer applications and their use is an important aspect of design. In various ways, designers need to externalize design proposals and present them to other designers, users, or managers. This article deals with understanding design representations and the work they do in design. The article is based on a series of theoretical concepts coming out of studies of scientific and other work practices and on practical experiences from design of computer applications. The article presents alternatives to the ideas that design representations are mappings of present or future work situations and computer applications. It suggests that representations are primarily containers of ideas and that representation is situated at the same time as representations are crossing boundaries between various design and use activities. As such, representations should be carriers of their own contexts regarding use and design. The article proposes that abstraction, elevating the representation from the situation, is not the only way to do this, and it proposes alternatives.     

Mining the Semantic Web

In the Semantic Web vision of the World Wide Web, content will not only be accessible to humans but will also be available in machine interpretable form as ontological knowledge bases. Ontological knowledge bases enable formal querying and reasoning and, consequently, a main research focus has been the investigation of how deductive reasoning can be utilized in ontological representations to enable more advanced applications. However, purely logic methods have not yet proven to be very effective for several reasons: First, there still is the unsolved problem of scalability of reasoning to Web scale. Second, logical reasoning has problems with uncertain information, which is abundant on Semantic Web data due to its distributed and heterogeneous nature. Third, the construction of ontological knowledge bases suitable for advanced reasoning techniques is complex, which ultimately results in a lack of such expressive real-world data sets with large amounts of instance data. From another perspective, the more expressive structured representations open up new opportunities for data mining, knowledge extraction and machine learning techniques. If moving towards the idea that part of the knowledge already lies in the data, inductive methods appear promising, in particular since inductive methods can inherently handle noisy, inconsistent, uncertain and missing data. While there has been broad coverage of inducing concept structures from less structured sources (text, Web pages), like in ontology learning, given the problems mentioned above, we focus on new methods for dealing with Semantic Web knowledge bases, relying on statistical inference on their standard representations. We argue that machine learning research has to offer a wide variety of methods applicable to different expressivity levels of Semantic Web knowledge bases: ranging from weakly expressive but widely available knowledge bases in RDF to highly expressive first-order knowledge bases, this paper surveys statistical approaches to mining the Semantic Web. We specifically cover similarity and distance-based methods, kernel machines, multivariate prediction models, relational graphical models and first-order probabilistic learning approaches and discuss their applicability to Semantic Web representations. Finally we present selected experiments which were conducted on Semantic Web mining tasks for some of the algorithms presented before. This is intended to show the breadth and general potential of this exiting new research and application area for data mining.     

Applying Learning Style Theory to Web Page Design

ABSTRACT

Library Web sites can be instructional tools, especially for those patrons who utilize library resources from their homes. Many libraries are developing online tutorials, but there is an opportunity for Web instruction on another level. The organization and design of a Web site can act as an instructional tool in itself. This paper is a call to library Web designers to assess their work in terms of learning style preferences. Learning style theory is based on how people process information and learn new material. Applying these ideas to Web page design can make library resources more accessible and improve the patron's comprehension of how the library works.     

Improving web accessibility: a study of webmaster perceptions

Large percentages of web sites continue to be inaccessible to people with disabilities. Since tools and guidelines are available to help designers and webmasters in making their web sites accessible, it is unclear why so many sites continue to be inaccessible. In this paper, we present the “Web Accessibility Integration Model,” which highlights the multiple points within web development where accessibility can be incorporated or forgotten. It is uncertain why webmasters do not use the various tools and guidelines that currently are available for making web sites accessible. A survey was created, and data was collected from 175 webmasters, indicating their knowledge on the topic of web accessibility and the reasons for their actions related to web accessibility. Findings and future directions for research are discussed.     

Agentsheets: a medium for creating domain-oriented visual languages

Customized visual representations enable end users to achieve their programming goals. Here, designers work with users to tailor visual programming languages to specific problem domains. We describe a design methodology and a tool for creating domain oriented, end user programming languages that effectively use visualization. We first describe a collaborative design methodology involving end users and designers. We then present Agentsheets, a tool for creating domain oriented visual programming languages, and illustrate how it supports collaborative design by examining experiences from a real language design project. Finally, we summarize the contributions of our approach and discuss its viability in industrial design projects     

Conceptual design and modification of freeform surfaces using dual shape representations in augmented reality environments

This paper enables the rapid creation and modification of freeform surfaces inside an augmented reality environment, and focuses on methods for enabling increased flexibility during exploratory, conceptual industrial product design through three-dimensional (3D) sketch-based user input. Specifically, we address the role of multiple shape representations with varying uncertainty levels during 3D conceptual sketching, along with methods to transform between those representations. The main contributions of this work are: (1) the formulation of virtual shape data in multiple, concurrent representations (points and surfaces), and a regression method to transition fluidly back and forth between these representations during design, (2) methods for deforming and exploring the product shape using these multiple representations, and (3) representations of these forms such that designers can explore conceptual designs without the need for detailed surface operations such as trimming or continuity enforcement. Through incorporating these contributions, we introduce techniques that can be incorporated in future computer-aided conceptual design systems. These contributions are demonstrated for freeform surface design, with examples of computer mouse and car seat exterior surfaces.