User behaviour in the context of structured documents

Abstract

This paper describes a small-scale experimental study examining user behaviour in the context of structured documents. Two variants of the same interface to support information seeking were implemented, one highlighting relevant objects and one highlighting best entry points (BEPs). BEPs are intended to support users' natural information seeking behaviour by providing optimal starting points for browsing to relevant objects. Analysis of the results from the comparative study of these two interfaces shows that the BEP interface was strongly preferred to the relevant object interface, and that appropriate usage of BEPs can lead to improved task performance. However, the study also highlighted shortcomings related to the inconsistent nature of BEPs and to BEP interface design. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.