Ergonomic Study On Single-page And Multi-pages Of Web Message Presentation

The presentation of webpage is important to user when search in the internet. But how to presentnumerous information of webpage into a limited computer screen is always a question todesigners. Our study used case study and experiments to examine the user performance andsatisfaction about two general types of webpage message presentation (i.e., single-page andmulti-pages), and with the aim at providing several empirical suggestions related to webpagepresentation design.The present study includes1case study and3experiments. In the case study, we collected thepage manipulations from nowadays multiple webpage, and divided them into4forms. Inexperiment1, we examined the4types of multiple webpage presentation such as pagination witha linear count of page chunks, pagination with drop-down selection of page chunks, paginationwith direct-enter text box and pagination only with forward and backward buttons onparticipants’ task performance and subjective rating. After these we found that the paginationwith a linear count of page chunks was optimal one. In experiment2, we further investigated theeffect of page presentation (single-page and multi-pages) on task completion performance andsubjective rating by manipulating task difficulty. The result showed that multi-pages tend to besuperior than single-page. So in experiment3, we wanted to know how to organize theinformation in multi-pages. We investigated user performance and satisfaction within two kindsof information organization, the one was organized information with navigation tabs, the otherwas unorganized information with page chunks.Results from our study together indicate these conclusions as followed:(1) There are four types of multi-pages pagination such as pagination with a linear count of pagechunks, pagination with drop-down selection of page chunks, pagination with direct-enter textbox and pagination only with forward and backward buttons in nowadays webpage.(2) Pagination with a linear count of page chunks is most used in webpage, and it is distributedinto all the kinds of websites in our collected cases. It is also the optimal one both in user performance and satisfaction.(3) Multi-pages tends to be superior than single-page both on user search performance andsatisfaction. Better performance in multi-pages only found in the hard task.(4) The information in multi-pages organized with navigation tabs is better than onesunorganized with page chunks both in user search performance and satisfaction.Based all these findings, we give the following suggestions:(1) If users just want to search some information, web pages choose multi-pages presentation isbetter.(2) The information in web pages should be organized by tabs, links, titles, and so on.(3) Unorganized information displayed in multi-pages with a linear count of page chunks is awise decision.