Main conference presentation

Information horizons: Proposing an alternate approach to assessing website architecture

Anindita Paul, Sanda Erdelez, Kyungsun Park

Monday April 14 2008, 11:45 - 12:30PM

Having a difficult time translating users’ need into the website architecture? Are you looking for ways to counter the influences of the lab environment or the issues with wording in surveys? Do you want to go a step further than surveys, interviews and focus groups? Here is another tool that can counter issues with user's feedback and attempts to provide highly contextual feedback from the user's perspective.

We propose the application of Sonnenwald's 'Information Horizons' (IH) framework that helps to get the user's feedback through a graphical representation of the user's behavior that involves the information sources they access, the tools they use to access that information and a verbal feedback of the user as a discussion of their behavior. The framework allows an open-ended unstructured protocol for the user to provide rich feedback in the relevant context through a free flow of information right from their past experience and usual information habits.

We will report the use of the IH framework for assessing a website architecture based on Morville and Rosenfeld’s components of website architecture - organization, labeling, navigation and searching information.