With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and the development of hierarchical web sites, it has become difficult for users to get an overview of the contents and structure of a given web site. To alleviate this problem, an application was developed at the HCIL at the University of Maryland, called WebTOC. This application provides a graphical description of the hierarchy of a web site and gives a breakdown of the types of data available at the site (text, video, audio, etc.). We propose to compare WebTOC with traditional methods of organizing web sites, i.e. a textual table of contents, or no contents page at all.
Three groups of subjects (10 subjects per group) will be asked to execute the same set of search/browsing tasks using three different interfaces. Subjects will be familiar with computers and the Web, but not necessarily expert users. They will receive an introduction to WebTOC followed by a brief practice session. Two versions of Web-TOC and a traditional Web browser will be used in the experiment. The "textual" Web-TOC has two frames. The right frame is used for viewing web pages. The left frame displays the names of web pages in the hierarchy. If the user clicks on one of these names, the page is displayed in the frame on the right. A page with links is indicated by a triangle pointing at its name. If the user clicks on the triangle, the entry is expanded to reveal the linked pages. The "graphical" version of Web-TOC has all of the capabilities of the first with the addition of a bar that indicates size and content of a page and it's links. The longer the bar, the bigger the file. The colors of the bar indicates how much of the page is text, image, audio and/or other. The subjects in each group will use one interface. Tasks will be related to either textual or multimedia content. Task execution times will be recorded. The subjects will receive tasks one by one and they will have to write down the answers. Users will be asked to fill out a user satisfaction questionnaire after executing the tasks.