Cognitive design of home pages: an experimental study of comprehension on the World Wide Web

摘要

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.