Improving Web site design

• Published in: IEEE internet computing Vol. 6; no. 2; pp. 56 - 63
• Main Authors: Ivory, M.Y., Hearst, M.A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Alamitos IEEE 01-03-2002; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Checkers; Computation; Computer graphics; Computer interfaces; Construction equipment; Guidelines; Interactive; Internet; Navigation; Productivity; Usability; Web design; Web page design; Web pages; Websites; Word processors
• ISSN: 1089-7801; 1941-0131
• DOI: 10.1109/4236.991444

Using quantitative measures of the informational, navigational, and graphical aspects of a Web site, a quality checker aims to help nonprofessional designers improve their Web sites. As part of the WebTango project, we explore automated approaches for helping designers improve their sites. Our goal is to create an interactive tool that helps steer occasional Web site builders away from bad designs and toward better ones - a "quality checker" tool, analogous to a grammar checker in a word processor. What distinguishes our work from most others is that this tool is based on empirically derived measures computed over thousands of Web pages. We converted these measures, which characterize the informational, navigational, and graphical aspects of a Web site, into profiles for a variety of site types. Our rudimentary design-checking tool uses these profiles to assess Web site designs; future versions will also suggest design improvements.