Website success is significantly associated with navigability, an important attribute of usability that denotes the ease with which users find desired information as they move through a website. Navigable websites allow users to form a mental model of the type and location of information in the website and an expectation of where and to what a particular hyperlink will lead. Existing navigability measures are based mainly on the static hyperlink structure of a website. Such measures, however, have two main drawbacks: 1) the effect on navigability of link structure cannot be well characterized; and 2) the effect on navigability of the navigation aids (such as the "°Back"± button provided by a browser) is ignored. In this paper, we abstract dynamic web surfing behavior as a Markov model and use this as the basis of a novel navigability measure, MNav. An empirical validation shows that MNav provides an effective and useful measurement of website navigability.
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