Effects of Navigation Tool Information on Hypertext Navigation Behavior: A Configural Analysis of Page-Transition Data
Patricia Boechler, Michael R. W. Dawson · Journal of educational multimedia and hypermedia · 2002
The effects of navigation tools in hypertext have been studied predominantly through performance measures such as speed, accuracy, number of pages accessed and recall of document elements. In contrast, the current study uses multidimensional scaling to examine differences in path data, specifically page-transition frequencies, for four navigation tool groups. Each of these navigation tools contains different combinations of spatial and conceptual information. Users’ page-transition choices during an information search task in a hypertext document with hierarchically organized material were examined. The results indicate that users’ page-transition patterns are heavily influenced by the type of information contained in the navigation tool but transition patterns are not totally linear.