Dalal, N. P., Quible, Z., & Wyatt, K. (2000). Cognitive design of home pages: An experimental study of comprehension on the world wide web. Information Processing & Management, 36(4), 607-621.

Dalal, N.;Quible, Z.;Wyatt, K.

2000

Dalal, N. P., Quible, Z., & Wyatt, K. (2000). Cognitive design of home pages: An experimental study of comprehension on the world wide web. Information Processing & Management, 36(4), 607-621.

geen

There are numerous guides on Web design but for the most part, these are based on designers' intuition and common sense' with little theoretical or experimental validation. A major problem is that there is a general lack of cognitive guidelines for Web design. Of the few available theoretical guidelines for designing hypermedia documents, very little experimental research is available that tests the guidelines in a Web context. This study empirically addresses the issue: do home pages designed according to theoretical guidelines lead to better comprehension of information at a Web site? Comprehension was measured along three dimensions: comprehension accuracy, comprehension speed, and perceived comprehension. The results of this study suggest that cognitively designed home pages lead to better comprehension than non-cognitively designed home pages, regardless of whether the home page is primarily graphics-based or text-based. The implications of these results for researchers and practitioners are discussed.

The results of this study suggest that cognitively designed homepages produce significantly better and faster comprehension than non-cognitively designed home pages. Furthermore, it did not matter whether the home page was graphics-based or text-based; comprehension was better and faster with cognitively designed pages.

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