Research On An Approach To Quantifying And Measuring Website Navigational Price

Web applications have been becoming crucial in various areas including governance, commerce, education and entertainment, and this has greatly enhanced our paces to the real information age. However, when people are more dependent on web services for their work and life, they also find that it has been much easier for them to lose themselves when visiting some websites. Especially when a website is not well organized by an effective navigational architecture, the users will have to be consumed more time, efforts or fees to locate particular information. In order to solve this problem, many researchers have started their work on optimization approaches for navigational design. Based on the inspiration from their outcomes, this paper indicates an approach capable of quantifying and measuring navigational price.In this paper, navigational price is defined as the uncertainty that a navigational architecture imposes on its users and could be used as main criteria for estimating the optimization level of the navigational architecture. A navigational architecture could be more effective if its navigational price has been made lower. And if the price is still very high, the architecture would be in great need of improvement. In order to describe and quantify the uncertainty imposed by a particular web page and by the entire system, the navigational price is represented respectively as the page-navigational price and the system-navigational price.The approach gives detailed descriptions of how to evaluate the accessibility of a navigational link based on its semantic cohesion with a particular user task. And the page-navigational price of a web page could be calculated, in form of information entropy, with the quantified accessibilities of navigational links in this page and all user tasks the website supports. Based on the modified Path Tree Spanning Algorithm, the improved methodology for quantifying a web page's accessibility, and all user tasks supported by the website, the measurement of system-navigational price is finally achieved.This paper also discusses the potential applications of navigational price, and some inspirations helpful in improving navigational design. It is expected that the approach could bring new methods to and further support the studies on website navigational optimization.