- Molly Sorrows <messt17@sis.pitt.edu>
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One of the major issues in the web environment is navigation. Within this
area important user interface challenges in web design are defining
landmarks within a site (especially other than the "home" page), and
maintaining access to those landmarks during navigation of the site.
Since a landmark may be relevant to a particular group of users or to a
particular task, the design of a site should allow for the use of
different landmarks. The challenge for user interface design is to find
how the definition and use of landmarks facilitate the user's development
of a cognitive model of the space and enable more effective navigation.
- The more general design issue is designing a site so that users maintain
their orientation in the information space during navigation, particularly
through different levels of a hierarchy or through different neighborhoods
of a network structure or web space. Landmarks play a key role in one's
ability to form a spatial representation of the environment, so they are
particularly important in the World-Wide Web where the non-linear
structure of the environment can lead to disorientation. Planning for
landmarks in user interface design provides an important contribution to
the user's understanding of both the organization and the content of the
information space. Several algorithms have been proposed for identifying
landmarks in the WWW using the levels of connectivity of a node, the
frequency of use of a node, and the depth of the node in the local WWW
directory structure.
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