Including Routes in Web Information Systems as a Way to Improve the Navigability: An Empirical Study

摘要

Simplifying the achievement of the user tasks is a factor that determines usability in Web development. In order to better reflect the best paths that may drive the user through the Web Information Systems (WISs) to search the desired information/services, navigation models have been widely adopted by the Web Engineering community. However, the design of WISs often relies only on a domain model leaving many decisions, which may directly affect usability, to the designer skills. In order to limit this arbitrarily in the navigation design process, we have proposed a hypertext modeling method (HM~3) which explicitly bases the construction of the navigation model on the services required by the user. This way, the navigation model built with HM~3, includes routes, which help the user to properly carry out the required service. The main goal of this paper is to present an experiment we carried out to corroborate the hypothesis that "using routes it is possible to obtain more navigable WISs".