NavOptim Coding: Web Navigational Construction to Minimise Navigation Effort

Dr Xiaoying Kong [HREF1], Faculty of Engineering [HREF2], University of Technology, Sydney, Australia [HREF3], Email: xiaoying.kong@uts.edu.au

Prof David Lowe [HREF4], Faculty of Engineering [HREF2], University of Technology, Sydney, Australia [HREF3], Email: david.lowe@uts.edu.au

Keywords

web design, web navigation, navigational effort, entropy, web metrics

Abstract

Web applications have rapidly become critical to the interaction that organisations have with their external stakeholders. A major factor in the effectiveness of this interaction is the ease with which users can locate information and functionality which they are seeking. Effective design is however complicated by the multiple purposes and users which Web applications typically support. In our earlier work we described a model for evaluating the overall navigation entropy of a Web application which provides a measure of the weighted effort required of users. In this paper we describe a navigational design method aimed at minimizing this navigational entropy. The approach uses a theoretical navigational depth for the various information and service components to moderate a nested hierarchical clustering of the content.