WWW timeline (2001)

Citation Timeline (2001):

Stuart K. Card, Peter Pirolli, Mija Van Der Wege, Julie B. Morrison, Robert W. Reeder, Pamela K. Schraedley, and Jenea Boshart. 2001. Information scent as a driver of Web behavior graphs: results of a protocol analysis method for Web usability. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '01). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 498-505.

This paper provides a new WWW protocol analysis methodology for studying users on the web and any other intensive information tasks. Using their developed protocol, they conducted an experiment on WWW users while they’re surfing the internet. They used a similar statistical analysis to [ref]. They emphasise that from [ref] that majority of users time over the www spent on finding information while reading surfing the WWW. Thus, they used a previous work on information foraging theory [ref 11 and 16 on paper] to analyze user tasks for finding information. They used, information patches; a representation for information needed for user tasks where user has to navigate through them; and information scent which provide information about the navigation cost and value.
   
Before conducting their experiment, they expanded the WWW experiment [ref] by genrating a WWW task bank that would have most of the tasks WWW users would perform while browsing the WWW. Additionally, they used a previous work at Georgia Tech [ref 8] and used their tasks classification to classify their test banks taxonomies under the following: (a) Purpose, (b) Method, and (c) Content.

Experiment was consisted of 14 students from Stanford University. The mean age was 23. Participants were asked to browse the internet as what they do in their daily life. 

Their protocol was consisted of the following: Current URL, a screenshot of the current website, event time (from the log file), a transcript of user verbal words (they were asked to explain what they’re doing while they were surfing the www). Every event has its own code-name. Additionally, they used a combination of recorded eye movements along with the mouse movements of each task with their recorded data.


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