Tuesday, September 18, 2012

WWW timeline (2000)

Citation Timeline (2000):

Melody Y. Ivory. 2000. Web TANGO: towards automated comparison of information-centric web site designs. In CHI '00 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (CHI EA '00). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 329-330.

This paper discusses the usability of websites. The author argue that, the design recommendations and guidelines for website are not enough. Thus, the need for the usability studies is there. They focus their usability study to enhance the information architecture. They proposed a new automated methodology and tool called TANGO (Tool for Assessing Navigation and Organization), to help organizing information flow in websites by providing an information-centric web sites.

Web Tango employe typical information retrieval techniques along with Monte Carlo simulation to simulate user behavior on website. Web Tango uses the taxonomy model (from the WWW paper) as the underlying model for it. Web page designer should provide the following information to the tool: page metadata, page complexity, links, and links out of website. Additionally, designer should provide information about user information tasks, along with some other data. After designer fill out those info, the tool will simulate the user navigational behavior.

Despite that author stated that this project is still ongoing project, I was wondering about the use of Monte Carlo simulation to simulate users and how accurate it is to the actual users. I haven’t seen any comments from the author about this issue, or an intentional attempt to validate their methodology and compare it with real users through a controlled experiment.

Andrew Sears and Julie A. Jacko. 2000. Understanding the relation between network quality of service and the usability of distributed multimedia documents. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 15, 1 (March 2000), 43-68.

This paper is a study about the usability of distributed  multimedia over the internet. The author focuses about the problem of network delays when retrieving multimedia on a distributed environment.
Their relation to the (ref) work, they have used their taxonomy capture users activities in their experiment. Additionally,they added two activities: providing information, and seeking information. Note that sometimes, user can have both activities. For example: using online payment, providing payment info, and seeking confirmation.  

Michael J. Albers and Loel Kim. 2000. User web browsing characteristics using palm handhelds for information retrieval. In Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society international professional communication conference and Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Computer documentation: technology \& teamwork (IPCC/SIGDOC '00).

This paper discusses the web page interfaces for personal digital assistants (PDA's) like Palm device. They discuss the limitations of web presentation and retrieval on these devices. Then, they provide the existing guidelines for web page design. Finally, discuss differences between web interface design for desktops and handheld devices. This paper only cited our (ref) to emphasize the existence of task-driven approaches! So, it did not build on it rather than indicating the existence of such techniques.   

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