• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.17-26
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• 2004

In this study, the usability evaluation of a menu-structure was performed using spreading activation model with respect to human's memory retrieval. Spreading Activation Model is effectively used to understand the process of information retrieval, so it can be used as a theoretical background for modeling of the process of human's information retrieval. For spreading activation test (SAT), subjects were presented with 67 pairs of menu titles, which consist of a menu title in the high level menu item and a menu title for the next lower level menu item, from Korea University's web site. For performance tests, three scenarios were developed with longer reaction times and ambiguous associations found in the SAT to reflect the existing problems of the website. As a result, the SAT was found to bean effective tool to enhance the website usability because the SAT could bea substitute for the performance test with a high correlation $({\rho}=0.735,\;{\alpha}=0.05)$. After remaining menu titles with slow reaction times and ambiguous associations found in SAT, the website usability was significantly improved with faster reaction times and less ambiguous associations proven with smaller number of web-page visits. Therefore, the SAT could be used as a methodology to design and evaluate the user-centered menu structure related to human's association structure.