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The tangled web we wove: A taskonomy of WWW use,
Byren, M.D., John, B.E., Wehrle, N.S. and Crow, D.C., CHI 99 Conference
Proceedings, 544-551(1999).
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Michael Byrne, Bonnie John and Neil Wehrle at Carnegie Mellon University
and David Crow of the Trilogy Development Group conducted a study to identify
the major activities performed by web users. The researchers attempted
to gain a clearer understanding of the tasks users performed most while
browsing the web, and to determine the relative time spent carrying-out
each of the major activities.
They found that most (58%) of the time, users were involved in "using
information." This included reading, printing and downloading information.
Another 12% of the time, users were visually searching for items on pages.
Thus, for about 70% of the total time, users were directly involved in
interacting with the web pages. In addition, users spent about 13% of
the total time providing requested information (e.g., filling out forms),
and another 5% responding to requests (e.g., providing a file name for
downloading).
Possibly of greater importance, most of the remaining time was spent
either waiting or scrolling. Unfortunately, over half of the time involved
in moving to other pages was spent waiting for pages to load (using fast
T3 network connections). Also, when using the websites, users were forced
to do considerable scrolling. When combined with "waiting,"
users spent about 1 hour and 27 minutes of the 5 hours either waiting
or scrolling.
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Searching hard-copy (paper) vs. electronic (CRT)
documents: Role of experience, amount of text displayed, and the book
metaphor, Blinn, B. and Biers, D.W., Proceedings of the Human Factors
and Ergonomics Society - 1999, 447-451 (1999).
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Benjamin Blinn and David Biers at the University of Dayton conducted
a recent study on searching performance when using three different formats.
They compared a paper-based document, a computer-based document that required
paging, and a computer-based document that required scrolling.
The researchers found that:
- people searched fastest using the paper-based document, and
- when searching websites with shorter pages, paging enabled users
to find information in reliably less time than did scrolling.
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Conclusions
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What can we learn from these studies? First, to expedite the use of websites,
we should design pages that load fast. I continue to be unimpressed with
the overuse of meaningless graphics, and totally impressed with well-designed
text-oriented pages that load quickly. With today’s higher bandwidths,
the goal for loading pages should be two seconds or less per page. The
old idea that 8 or 10 seconds represents acceptable response times is
not true. We have known for years, that several seconds is much too slow
for many, if not most, serious computer interactions.
Second, to improve use of websites, we should attempt to reduce the amount
of required scrolling.
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