An empirical study of the effectiveness of spatial navigation system - Focus on large-scale web sites -

공간 지식을 적용한 항해 시스템에 관한 연구 - 대규모 웹 사이트를 중심으로 -

As the average size of web sites gets larger, users tend to experience more severe problems while navigating through the sites. In order to alleviate the navigation-related problems, this paper proposes two new navigation systems based on the spatial metaphor to the navigation in the real world. Prototypes of the two system, Complete Route Navigation(CRN) and Complete Survey Navigation(CSN), were developed and applied to four versions of test bed web sites, which were then used in an experiment to test the effectiveness of the two navigation systems. Results from the experiment indicate that the two systems are indeed effective in aiding users to navigate in a large scale web site, and have more positive impacts when provided together. This paper ends with the limits of the study results and their implications to the development of large-scale web sites.