Conceptual Connections should determine Links on Websites, finds Study

Most people connect webpages together thematically, not spatially, when asked to recall the structure of websites, bringing into question the value of sitemaps, claims a new study.

Participants in a study of virtual space were asked to draw connections between pages on a website that they had just explored by Kansas State University psychologists Shawn Farris, Keith Jones and Peter Elgin with a view to investigating the effect of the different organisational structures available to website designers. However, participants in the study did not produce structures that resembled the sites at all. Actual levels and hierarchies - which ranged from flat to multi-level - were ignored. Participants all produced remarkably similar looking structures with three to four levels based on categorical information.

The researchers conclude that conceptual relationships were being represented and suggest that the gap between these relationships and the links on a site may account for the varying utility of sitemaps. There is a school of thinking that sitemaps are a necessary feature on websites to help people navigate: for instance, Jakob Nielsen has argued for them. However, many sites have abandoned these in favour of guides to the different areas of a site. The research supports this trend by challenging the common assumption that people hold on to spatial information when navigating around websites. In fact, Farris, Jones and Elgin argue that hypermedia is 'inherently non-spatial'.

Their paper "Users' Schemata of Hypermedia: What's so Spatial about Websites?" will be published in a forthcoming issue of Interacting with Computers.

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