An Empirical Research Of Web Site Navigation Structures' Impacts On B2C Web Site Usability

With the rapid development of Information technology, more and more enterprises come to the market of e-commerce, to consolidate or strengthen their competitiveness in the current environment. The e-commerce web site is an important platform of communication between internet companies and online consumers, and it plays an important role in the B2C trading. But the B2C web site usability can become a restricted factor for the online transactions successfully.Based on discussing web site navigation structures'impacts on web site usability in the B2C business environment, in accordance with the semantics and syntax features, the navigation structure will be classified into subject-oriented navigation, usage-oriented navigation and combined navigation. On the basic of the analysis of many literatures, this paper supports that web site navigation structure affects web site usability; task complexity affects web site usability. Therefore, from web site usability performance and web site perception usability, the experiment directed by the user-based observation for metrics of the usability of assessment methods, measures web site usability. Then, tool of SPSS 13.0 is used on data analysis. The result validates that the combined navigation structure's impact on web site perception usability and web site usability performance is better than subject-oriented navigation structure, but the interaction between navigation structure and task complexity doesn't affect web site usability. Finally, the conclusion not only provides on the design optimization of navigation for usability, but also indicates that the shortcomings of the study and further studies.