Evaluating ecommerce websites cognitive efficiency: An integrative framework based on data envelopment analysis

This paper presents an integrative framework to evaluate ecommerce website efficiency from the user viewpoint using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This framework is inspired by concepts driven from theories of information processing and cognition and considers the website efficiency as a measure of its quality and performance. When the users interact with the website interfaces to perform a task, they are involved in a cognitive effort, sustaining a cognitive cost to search, interpret and process information, and experiencing either a sense of satisfaction or dissatisfaction for that. The amount of ambiguity and uncertainty, and the search (over-)time during navigation that they perceive determine the effort size – and, as a consequence, the cognitive cost amount – they have to bear to perform their task. On the contrary, task performing and result achievement provide the users with cognitive benefits, making interaction with the website potentially attractive, satisfying, and useful. In total, 9 variables are measured, classified in a set of 3 website macro-dimensions (user experience, site navigability and structure). The framework is implemented to compare 52 ecommerce websites that sell products in the information technology and media market. A stepwise regression is performed to assess the influence of cognitive costs and benefits that mostly affect website efficiency.     

Non-visual navigation of spreadsheets

The problem of non-visual navigation of the information in Excel? spreadsheet is that using current technologies, no overview is available for the user about different components found in the spreadsheet. Several attributes associated with spreadsheets make them not easy to navigate by individuals who are blind. The large amount of information stored in the spreadsheet, the multi-dimensional nature of the contents, and the several features it includes cannot be readily linearized by a screen reader or Braille display (e.g., charts and tables). A user-centered design paradigm is followed to build an accessible system for non-visual navigation of Microsoft Excel? spreadsheet. The proposed system provides the user with a hierarchical overview of the navigated components in an Excel? spreadsheet. The system is multi-modal, and it provides the user with different navigation and reading modes for the non-visual navigation of a spreadsheet. This will help the users in adapting the non-visual navigation according to the task the user needs to accomplish.     

Do we trust the crowd or information system? Effects of personalization and bandwagon cues on users' attitudes and behavioral intentions toward a restaurant recommendation website

Visual interface cues on many websites can influence Internet users' psychology, especially their perceptions about the site as well as its content (Sundar, 2008). Specifically, presence of commonly used interface cues (e.g., personalization, bandwagon cues) can substantially influence users' attitudes and their behavioral intentions toward websites and their content. This study examined the effect of personalization feature and bandwagon cues (i.e., star ratings, reviews) in a restaurant recommendation website, measuring (a) to what extent users positively perceive and plan on revisiting or sharing the site, and (b) to what degree users favored the recommended restaurant and plan to visit them. A 2 (personalization feature: present vs. absent) × 2 (bandwagon cues: high vs. low) between-subjects experiment showed that personalization feature and bandwagon cues increased positive perceptions and their behavioral intentions toward both the website and the recommended restaurant. Moreover, results revealed that users' perceived relevance as well as perceived novelty mediated the effects of interface cues on their attitudinal and behavioral consequences. Further, the impact of the interface cues on user psychology significantly differed as a function of the other cues. Theoretical and practical implications for future research on the effect of interface cues on user psychology are discussed.     

Implicit measures of lostness and success in web navigation

In two studies, we investigated the ability of a variety of structural and temporal measures computed from a web navigation path to predict lostness and task success. The user’s task was to find requested target information on specified websites. The web navigation measures were based on counts of visits to web pages and other statistical properties of the web usage graph (such as compactness, stratum, and similarity to the optimal path). Subjective lostness was best predicted by similarity to the optimal path and time on task. The best overall predictor of success on individual tasks was similarity to the optimal path, but other predictors were sometimes superior depending on the particular web navigation task. These measures can be used to diagnose user navigational problems and to help identify problems in website design.     

基于用户交互模型的会员网站每日活跃用户量分析

现有的网站往往向注册用户提供服务,而网站中的每日活跃用户量往往决定着网站建设的成败。为了描述网站中每日活跃用户的动态变化,本文将用户在网站上的交互行为分为响应、扩散和衰落三种类型,并提出了一种基于用户交互模型的每日活跃用户量模型。通过响应、扩散和衰落三种交互行为的定义,进一步推导出每日活跃用户随着时间的变化率。通过对每日活跃用户随着时间的变化率进行分析得到如下结论,当网站中用户的响应概率小于衰落概率时网站的活跃用户将趋向于0,反之活跃用户趋于某个固定的常数。大量的真实数据实验表明,不论网站自身的运营是否成功,本文提出的方法都可以很好的描述网站的每日活跃用户数量及其发展趋势,这对于网站的建设和维护具有重要的指导意义。     

Navigation in 3D virtual environments: Effects of user experience and location-pointing navigation aids

In this paper, we describe the results of an experimental study whose objective was twofold: (1) comparing three navigation aids that help users perform wayfinding tasks in desktop virtual environments (VEs) by pointing out the location of objects or places; (2) evaluating the effects of user experience with 3D desktop VEs on their effectiveness with the considered navigation aids. In particular, we compared navigation performance (in terms of total time to complete an informed search task) of 48 users divided into two groups: subjects in one group had experience in navigating 3D VEs while subjects in the other group did not. The experiment comprised four conditions that differed for the navigation aid that was employed. The first and the second condition, respectively, exploited 3D and 2D arrows to point towards objects that users had to reach; in the third condition, a radar metaphor was employed to show the location of objects in the VE; the fourth condition was a control condition with no location-pointing navigation aid available. The search task was performed both in a VE representing an outdoor geographic area and in an abstract VE that did not resemble any familiar environment. For each VE, users were also asked to order the four conditions according to their preference. Results show that the navigation aid based on 3D arrows outperformed (both in terms of user performance and user preference) the others, except in the case when it was used by experienced users in the geographic VE. In that case, it was as effective as the others. Finally, in the geographic VE, experienced users took significantly less time than inexperienced users to perform the informed search, while in the abstract VE the difference was significant only in the control and the radar conditions. From a more general perspective, our study highlights the need to take into specific consideration user experience in navigating VEs when designing navigation aids and evaluating their effectiveness.     

Collaborative video searching on a tabletop

Almost all system and application design for multimedia systems is based around a single user working in isolation to perform some task yet much of the work for which we use computers to help us, is based on working collaboratively with colleagues. Groupware systems do support user collaboration but typically this is supported through software and users still physically work independently. Tabletop systems, such as the DiamondTouch from MERL, are interface devices which support direct user collaboration on a tabletop. When a tabletop is used as the interface for a multimedia system, such as a video search system, then this kind of direct collaboration raises many questions for system design. In this paper we present a tabletop system for supporting a pair of users in a video search task and we evaluate the system not only in terms of search performance but also in terms of user–user interaction and how different user personalities within each pair of searchers impacts search performance and user interaction. Incorporating the user into the system evaluation as we have done here reveals several interesting results and has important ramifications for the design of a multimedia search system.     

ASP.NET2.0的Web页面导航方式比较与选择

为了方便用户,多数网站都采用了页面导航.有了页面导航的功能,用户可以很方便地在一个复杂的网站中进行页面之间的跳转.在以往的Web编程中,要写一个好的页面导航功能,并不是那么容易的,也要使用一些技巧.而在ASP.NET2.0中,为了方便进行页面导航,新增了页面导航控件sitemapdatasource控件和其它如treeview等一些页面控件,使得能很方便地实现页面导航的不同形式.本文介绍了ASP.NET2.0应用中Web页面之间的几种导航方式,分别分析了各种导航方式的异同和优缺点,以帮助选择最佳的导航方式.     

Reasoning About Users' Actions in a Graphical User Interface

This article is about a graphical user interface (GUI) that provides intelligent help to users. The GUI is called IFM (Intelligent File Manipulator). IFM monitors users while they work; if a user has made a mistake with respect to his or her hypothesized intentions, then IFM intervenes automatically and offers advice. IFM has two underlying reasoning mechanisms: One is based on an adaptation of a cognitive theory called human plausible reasoning and the other one performs goal recognition based on the effects of users' commands. The requirement analysis of the system has been based on an empirical study that was conducted involving real users of a standard file manipulation program like the Windows Explorer; this analysis revealed a need for intelligent help. Finally, IFM has been evaluated in comparison with a standard file manipulation GUI and in comparison with human experts acting as consultants. The results of the evaluation showed that IFM can produce successfully advice that is helpful to users.     

多障碍物环境下挖掘机的连续避障轨迹规划

针对多障碍物环境下,挖掘机在挖掘过程中,铲斗碰到障碍物无法进行适应性调整的问题,利用三次多项式和积分法规划挖掘轨迹,采用盲人摸路算法对挖掘过程中挖掘机与障碍物发生碰撞后进行及时有效的调整,运用原像规划算法判断避障方向。为了方便进行避障算法验证,利用Matlab图形用户界面（GUI）设计了一个能够实现参数设置、结果展示等功能的可视化界面。仿真实验表明,该避障算法能够在复杂环境中,多次平滑绕开障碍物来完成连续避障任务。     

Exploring the design criteria of website interfaces for gender

The interface is the major channel through which users to navigate a website to find information matching their needs; nevertheless, gender-specific preferences for websites interface design have not been sufficiently explored or evaluated based on comprehensive and systematic approaches in past research. This study investigated the website interface design criteria for users of different genders based on usability principles. Undergraduate and graduate students in Taiwan were selected as the target sample. A total of 236 valid questionnaires were analyzed. The results showed significant gender differences in scaling of the importance of website interface design criteria. The three most important website interface design criteria for males were compatibility, minimal action, and flexibility, whereas the three most important design criteria for females were compatibility, learnability, and user guidance. This paper discusses the possible explanations for the gender differences and their implications for website design.     

Correction to: Can search result summaries enhance the web search efficiency and experiences of the visually impaired users?

There are limited studies that are addressing the challenges of visually impaired (VI) users when viewing search results on a search engine interface by using a screen reader. This study investigates the effect of providing an overview of search results to VI users. We present a novel interactive search engine interface called InteractSE to support VI users during the results exploration stage in order to improve their interactive experience and web search efficiency. An overview of the search results is generated using an unsupervised machine learning approach to present the discovered concepts via a formal concept analysis that is domain-independent. These concepts are arranged in a multi-level tree following a hierarchical order and covering all retrieved documents that share maximal features. The InteractSE interface was evaluated by 16 legally blind users and compared with the Google search engine interface for complex search tasks. The evaluation results were obtained based on both quantitative (as task completion time) and qualitative (as participants’ feedback) measures. These results are promising and indicate that InteractSE enhances the search efficiency and consequently advances user experience. Our observations and analysis of the user interactions and feedback yielded design suggestions to support VI users when exploring and interacting with search results.

     

Public websites and human–computer interaction: an empirical study of measurement of website quality and user satisfaction

The focus of this paper is to investigate measurement of website quality and user satisfaction. More specifically, the paper reports on a study investigating whether users of high-quality public websites are more satisfied than those of low-quality websites. Adopting a human–computer interaction perspective, we have gathered data from the 2009 public website awards in Scandinavia. Our analysis of Norwegian and Danish websites reveals that the use of quality criteria is highly technical compared to the traditional usability testing focus on efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction of the actual system use by representatives. A Pearson correlation analysis of user evaluation from 296 websites that participated in the Danish web award Bedst på Nettet (‘Top of the Web’) showed no significant positive correlation between website quality and user satisfaction. We put forward recommendations for further investigation: (1) inclusion of real users (citizens and businesses) in real-use setting in the evaluation process could help move forward the understanding of the relationship between website quality and end-user satisfaction; (2) the lack of correlation between website quality and user satisfaction could be a point of departure for critical discussions of future implementation of public information and services and (3) additional and in-depth research of the measurement of website quality in the public sector, user expectations and the impacts of website quality improvements on user satisfaction.     

Modeling users' task performance on the mobile device: PC convergence system

This study aims to establish a model-based approach for user interface design that simultaneously considers the system's information hierarchy, users' task procedure knowledge, and system interfaces. The approach is based on a framework that contains multiple interaction models to express both system elements and users' knowledge. The framework evaluates system interface through the interaction between user's knowledge on interface, task procedure and information structure perceived by the user in the system. The interface is evaluated by its contribution to the users' task performance and system navigation.These three factors were defined as design factors that affect users' task performance. Through the crosscheck process of models, the relation between information, interface, and task procedure is calculated into combined difficulty index (CDI) that expresses the difficulty of a system interface that users would experience during the use of system. A user test was conducted for the validation of the CDI. The difficulties of the interface of a mobile healthcare system were predicted with the CDI, and the predictions were compared with the experimental results, where the users' performance showed consistence with the prediction.     

A Multimethod Evaluation of Online Trust and Its Interaction with Metacognitive Awareness: An Emotional Design Perspective

Despite the rapidly increasing numbers of informational websites and learners using the World Wide Web to research topics, empirical evidence on the relationships between website design elements and website trustworthiness is scarce. This study used self-reported and behavioral screen-capture data to investigate the impact of Don Norman's (2003) emotional design levels and metacognitive awareness on website trustworthiness during an information search learning task. The results suggest that the interaction effects of website visual appeal (visceral level) and website usability (behavioral level) can override the effects of the quality or relevance of the information (reflective level) on website evaluation. In addition, in the context of limited time to find the answers, these effects on the evaluation of website trustworthiness are not moderated by users’ metacognitive awareness.     

Measuring website quality: asymmetric effect of user satisfaction

Website quality measurement tools have been largely static and have struggled to determine relevant attributes of user satisfaction. This study compares and contrasts attributes of user satisfaction based on usability guidelines seeking to identify practical easy-to-administer measurement tools. The website users assessed business school homepages according to six criteria and fulfilled a randomly assigned yet typical task. After completing the task, respondents assessed the same six website quality/satisfaction criteria again. The consumer–product relationship seems similar to the link between a user and a website. User satisfaction, just like consumer satisfaction, is asymmetric and non-linear. Content and navigation have been identified as key ingredients when users judged website quality, alerting web designers and website practitioners to focus more closely on those attributes. Similar lessons can be drawn for marketing professionals, who typically supervise or determine the content, structure and other website facets.     

Linking card sorting to browsing performance – are congruent municipal websites more efficient to use?

Card sorting is a method for eliciting mental models and is frequently used for creating efficient website navigation structures. The present studies set out to validate card sorting by linking browsing performance to the degree of match between the mental model and the navigation structure. First, a card sorting study was conducted (n?=?27) to elicit users’ mental model of municipal websites. Second, performance was measured for a number of search tasks with varying degrees of congruence with users’ mental model (n?=?50). Analysis by linear mixed-effect models suggests that the match between mental model and website structure has no effect on browsing performance. We discuss possible reasons and consequences of the failure to validate card sorting for designing navigation structures of informational websites.     

Power of the Swipe: Why Mobile Websites Should Add Horizontal Swiping to Tapping,Clicking, and Scrolling Interaction Techniques

Horizontal swiping has become a common interaction technique on smartphones, yet many mobile websites do not incorporate this functionality, instead requiring users to scroll down or click on buttons, arrow keys, and other hotspots. This is perhaps because user studies comparing swiping with other interaction techniques are scarce. An experiment was conducted (N = 252) to inform this issue by investigating whether and how adding the swiping functionality to a tap-only mobile website influences users’ intentions to use the website. The data revealed that the addition of swiping technique positively affected behavioral intentions to use the website. Perceived enjoyment was a key variable that explained this effect. These findings have design implications for mobile websites.     

Permissive user interfaces

User interfaces often only support one way to do a task when the physical interface or the requirements of the task would permit other ways. In contrast, a user interface that supports multiple approaches is permissive. This paper argues that permissive user interfaces are easier to use—and even when they are not applicable for particular applications, considering permissiveness is a productive design heuristic.Many user interfaces are difficult to use yet very easily demonstrated or explained by experts—with the results that users become frustrated because hindsight makes usability problems look like the user's own fault. The lack of permissiveness in such user interfaces explains this paradox.     

Usability testing — on a budget: a NASA usability test case study

Abstract

Okay, so you've purchased a graphical user interface (GUI) builder tool to help you quickly build a sophisticated user interface, and your developers promise to follow a particular style guide (e.g., OSF/Motif, Apple/Macintosh) when creating the GUI. This is definitely a step in the right direction, but it is no guarantee that the application's user interface will be usable; that is, where the user interface helps, rather than hinders, the end-users from doing their jobs. Numerous techniques for testing the usability and user satisfaction of an application's GUI are available, such as design walk-throughs, field testing with beta releases, demonstrations of prototypes to future end-users, and user questionnaires. One of the most effective techniques is usability testing with defined tasks and metrics, and yet, it is not commonly used in project development life cycles at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). This paper discusses a low-budget, but effective, approach we used at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to perform structured usability testing. It did not require any additional staff or a usability laboratory, but did successfully identify problems with the application's user interface. The purpose of the usability testing was two-fold: (1) to test the process used in the usability test; and (2) to apply the results of the test to improving the subject software's user interface. This paper will discuss the results from the test and the lessons learned. It will conclude with a discussion of future plans to conduct cost benefit analysis and integrate usability testing as a required step in a project's development life cycle.