Informationssökning i tre olika hypertextstrukturer - ett experiment
HypertextExperimentHypertextstrukturerDatorbaserad informationssökning - bibliotekDocumentationInformationLibrary scienceArchivisticsArkiv- och bibliotekskunskapDokumentationSocial Sciences
The aim of this study was to find out if hypertext structure has any relevance for the efficiency of information retrieval. An experiment, in which three variants of hypertext structure were compared, was carried out in the autumn of 1998. Three websites with different structures were constructed for this purpose: a sequential version, a hierarchical version and a webcluster version. 44 subjects, all students at the University of Lund, were randomly divided into three groups. Subjects were requiered to answer a number of questions using one of the three versions. Our hypothesis was that subjects using the sequential version should answer more questions correctly than subjects using the other versions. The results showed no significant differences between the three versions. On the other hand we found that expert users of Internet more frequently answered more questions correctly than novice users of Internet, despite that both expert and novice users felt equally lost navigating the structure. Results also showed that subjects using the web cluster version felt significantly less lost than subjects using the other versions.