Helping Users, Mentally: A Lesson Learned from Hypertext and Web Navigation

Abstract

The World Wide Web offers a vast collection of information. As the result, information seeking and related activities have become increasingly common. However, several drawbacks of the current systems often cause some user frustrations. One source of frustration is the way information is presented on the Web. It appears that virtually anyone could become an information source and Web site owner. As such, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have a standardized structure on how information should be structured and presented on the Web. This chapter presents a comprehensive literature review on information seeking emphasizing aspects of human cognition. It starts by pointing out some problems the information seekers may encounter when searching the Web. It proceeds with a navigation metaphor to compare the real-word navigation into hypertext navigation.