Project Goals

The goal of this project is to develop a method for improving the efficiency of web-based interactive systems. Web-based systems are normally designed by hand using design guidelines, the structure of the information and intuitions about the intended users and how these will use the system. A version of its may be evaluated with a user panel. After some time the system may be revised because there is new content, new functionality or a new implementation environment. In this project we want to incorporate two additional resources: (a) similar systems and (b) usage data.

The system that we are developing is able to compare a draft web-based system with a collection of other systems that is compiled by the user. The result of the comparison is a list of terms, pages, link structures, scripts, etc. in which the current draft system differs from systems in the list. This can then be used to refine the draft. The main difficulty here is how to compare websites and how to detect general characteristics of a collection of websites.

The other resource is usage data. If a system has been used for some time, data can be collected on users workflow. We plan to combine the comparisons of the content and the structure with workflow data to propose improvements, building on methods for analysing and using workflow data that we developed in an earlier project (DUMPERS).

The research is done by the Human-Computer Studies Laboratory in collaboration with Euro IT&C and supported by SenterNovem in the context of the IOPMMI program.

The SiteGuide Tool

An important step in the design process for a web site is to determine which information is to be included and how the information should be organized on the web site’s pages. Usually, web designers are not experts on the content or domain of a new site and the domain experts are no designers. The goal of SiteGuide is to assist both groups by creating a first description of the content topics with a tentative structure for the site. We present ’SiteGuide’, a system that helps both amateur and professional web designers to create a setup for a new web site by presenting an initial information architecture.

In the early phases of web site design, reviewing web sites from the same domain as the target site are often used as source of inspiration for the new site. For instance, a personwho wants to build a site for a small soccer club will look at web sites of some other small soccer clubs. However, comparing sites manually is very time-consuming and error-prone, especially when the sites consist of many pages. SiteGuide takes as input a set of user-selected web sites of the same type as the target website (typically 3 to 10). The system creates an initial information architecture for a new site by efficiently and systematically comparing a set of example sites identified by the user. SiteGuide automatically searches the sites for topics and structures that the sites have in common. For example, in the soccer club domain, it may find that most example sites contain information about youth teams or that pages about membership always link to pages about subscription fees. The common topics are brought together in a model of the example sites.

The tool then presents this found common information architecture to the user in both textual and visual form. SiteGuide can be used as a standalone tool or its output can serve as a starting point for further design refinement. SiteGuide can also be used in in a critiquing scenario for a first draft of a new web site. The draft is compared with the model, so that missing topics or unusual information structures are revealed.