Web TANGO Project Melody Ivory Ph D student

Web TANGO Project Melody Ivory (Ph. D student) • Rashmi Sinha (Postdoc) Marti Hearst (Research Advisor) Undergrads - Steve Demby • Anthony Lee • Dave Lai HCC Retreat July 5, 2000

Research Goal n Develop tools to enable designers to compare alternative designs n Most usability problems linked to information architecture Information Design Courtesy of Mark Newman Navigation Design Graphic Design

Tools Under Development n Web Page Design Tool n Use quantitative measures to compare implemented Web pages to highly rated ones n n n Currently 12 metrics (e. g. , number of words, links, colors, etc. ) Empirical study highlights key metrics that are indicative of highly rated pages Incorporating empirical findings n Automatic analysis – identify potential problems n n Visualizing differences between a page and related, highly rated ones Automatic critique – identify potential problems & suggest improvements

Tools Under Development n Simulation Tool (Monte Carlo Simulator) n Use simulator to assess implemented and design Web pages n n n Mimic information-seeking behavior (multiple user models) and compute quantitative results (e. g. , number of errors and navigation time) Predictions based on empirical findings with quantitative measures Incorporate into DENIM

Tools Under Development DENIM Simulator Implemented Site Metrics Computation Tool Heuristics Based on empirical findings Design Tool

Research Status n Metrics Computation Tool n New metrics & capabilities n n Basic UI this summer (Steve) Simulator Tool n n 2 nd empirical study User studies Design Tool n n E. g. , functional types for pages (David) DENIM incorporation - property sheets (Anthony) More Info n www. cs. berkeley. edu/~ivory/research/web/

Questions