In our study, we measured the time needed to navigate through web pages in different screen sizes. We chose the website Yahoo! and gave subjects tasks involving reading the pages and following links. We measured the time needed to complete each task for each subject, as well as the user's background experience and satisfaction of using different screen sizes.
Our hypothesis, taken from our original experiment proposal was as follows:
We believe that the full screen browser window produce the fastest navigation times and the least navigation errors due to the lack of need to scroll down the page to find information.
We recruited twelve college students from the University of Maryland at College Park to participate in our experiment. These subjects ranged from Sophmore through Grad Student and their experience using the World Wide Web ranged from novice to expert.
The materials needed for our experiment were modest.
We used a Gateway 2000 Pentium Pro 180 with a 17" monitor in 1024x768 resolution, running the following programs:
Subjects participating in the study were first given a background survey (Rich Text File or .gif file) to fill out. This survey provided us with information about each subject's experience with web browsing software and their general education.
Subjects were then seated at the computer and given a piece of paper with an example link set to follow from a starting page as a training exercise in a random (small, medium, or large) sized browser window. The training exercise was designed to help subjects understand what to do during the actual experiment.
The links subjects were asked to follow for training were:Once the subjects had gone through the training run, they were given a series of three link sets similar to the training set and asked to follow each link set in a random sized web browser. The experiment was run such that each subject ran through each set of links and used all three screen sizes, but not necessarily in the same order. The link sets used follow below in table 1:
| Link set 1 | Link set 2 | Link set 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Table 1: Link Sets |
The time at which each subject clicked on each of the links was automatically recorded by the proxy server that was running on the computer. This enabled us to get accurate readings on how long it took each subject for each link. This also allowed us not to have to record the times by hand which would have been a nuisance during the actual experiment.
Once the subject finished all three link sets, they were given a subjective satisfaction survey (Rich Text Format or .gif file) on which they rated which of the screen sizes they were the most comfortable with and what the ideal screen size would be.
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