Synergistic Use of Visualisation Technique and Web Navigation Model for Information Space Exploration
Résumé
Problems related to navigation are known as the most frequently reported by users when browsing large Web sites. Users become quickly lost in large collections of pages especially if little contextual information is given to explore the information space. In this paper, we discuss the importance of providing users with a unified representation of structure and navigation information of Web sites as a way to prevent the lost-in-space phenomena. We present a notation to support navigation design of Web applications, the StateWebCharts, which explicitly represent structure and navigation in a seamless way. The Bifocal Tree, a technique originally developed for visualizing hierarchical structures, is extended and used to display StateWebCharts specifications, taking advantage of their characteristics to represent both structure and navigation information.