navigational complexity in web interactions
As the web grows in size, interfaces & interactions across websites diverge - for differentiation and arguably for a better user experience. However, this size & diversity is also a cognitive load for the user who has to learn a new user interface for every new website she visits. Several studies have confirmed the importance of well designed websites. In this paper, we propose a method for quantitative evaluation of the navigational complexity of user interactions on the web. Our approach of quantifying interaction complexity exploits the modeling of the web as a graph and uses the information theoretic definition of complexity. It enables us to measure the navigational complexity of web interaction in bits . Our approach is structural in nature and can be applied to both traditional paradigm of web interaction (browsing) and to emerging paradigms of web interaction like web widgets.
complexity user interaction widgets graph theory hypertext