Methods of mapping websites to assist users' navigation

Summary

Websites and corporate intranets are very large information spaces. Even though the link structure is often complex, the underlying information structure is often presented hierarchically. The aim of this project is to determine how such structure can be visualized in a map-like form that helps users to browse and search. The project is divided into four parts: (1) classify the ways in which websites are structured, and how we need to assist users browsing and searching, (2) identify visualization methods that match those structures and the tasks that users perform, (3) perform controlled user experiments to identify the most effective style of visualization, and (4) automatically generate maps in that visualization style from web crawls or website design schema.

References:

Ruddle, R. A. (2009). How do people find information on a familiar website? Proceedings of the 23rd BCS Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI’09), 262-268.

Ruddle, R. A. (2010). INSPIRE: A new method of mapping information spaces. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV’10), 273-279.

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