Network User Navigation Lost

Internet uses hypertext technology which accords with character of human thinking to organize information. It's convenient for people to acquire information. Whereas, people find it's difficult to seek requisite information as quickly as possible, they feel disoriented frequently in web, which is one of the fundamental difficulties of Internet. Users feel frustrated and desperate when they are disoriented; they are not confident in seeking and tend to give up the task. So it's significant to research disorientation. This paper aims to explore the effect of navigation and cognitive style on getting lost.Firstly, this paper reviews the basic content of information architecture (IA), compares research conditions at home and abroad, and summarizes three typical opinions in China. Research on IA has transferred from theory-exploring to application.The research focuses on the users experience and the application in certain field, such as library. Secondly, this paper deeply analyzes mechanism of disorientation on two facets. On one hand, based on cognitive load theory, the paper interprets the causation of disorientation from human memory structure. On the other hand, the author explains the reasons of disorientation by using information understanding model, and comes the reasons to three facets: navigation design, knowledge and experience, cognitive style. Then, the paper designs and organizes a navigation disorientation experiment and takes 64 undergraduates as the experiment object to analyze the influence of advantages and disadvantages of navigation system and cognitive style on disorientation, cognitive style contains field-dependence users and field-independence users. Finally, according to the experiment outcome, the paper gives suggestion on website design.This paper proves the fact that navigation effects on disorientation and finds out that illogical navigation classification is the most important factor to arise disorientation. At the same time, the paper finds that the effect of cognitive style on disorientation is concerned with page layout distribution. This study deepens IA application, and supplies reference for futher research.