Mobrand, K. A., & Spyridakis, J. H. (2007). Explicitness of local navigational links: Comprehension, perceptions of use, and browsing behavior. Journal of Information Science, 33(1), 41-61.

Mobrand, K.; Spyridakis, J.

2007

Mobrand, K. A., & Spyridakis, J. H. (2007). Explicitness of local navigational links: Comprehension, perceptions of use, and browsing behavior. Journal of Information Science, 33(1), 41-61.

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This study investigated the effect of explicitness of navigational links on comprehension, perceptions of use, and browsing behaviour in an informational web site. The purpose was to determine whether link explicitness would assist users in overcoming cognitive overload and disorientation. Subjects took a pre-knowledge survey, browsed web pages in one of four link explicitness conditions, and took a post-browsing survey on comprehension and perceptions of use. Link explicitness differentially affected the outcome measures. Organizationally explicit navigational links resulted in lower scores on the post-comprehension survey. A combined condition of semantically and organizationally explicit links resulted in subjects reporting that they followed more embedded links. Traditional links and semantically/organizationally explicit links resulted in subjects exploring more of the study web site. These results, together with subjects' comments and webserver log files, indicate that navigational link labels clearly affect user performance - ambiguous link labels degrade comprehension and constrain browsing; traditional navigational links and links that provide dual signaling encourage broader sampling of a web site.

The study revealed that subjects in the organizational condition scored significantly lower on the post-comprehension test than subjects in both the semantic and the semantic/organizational conditions and somewhat lower than subjects in the generic condition.

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