ADVANCE Fellows Award: Designing Websites to Accommodate and Narrow the Knowledge/Skill Gaps Across the Digital Divide

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

EIA-0137750 Marilyn H. Blackman University of Colorado at Boulder This proposal, bridging the gap between what users know and what they need to know, pursues the problems of extending, refining, and validating a theory-based cognitive walkthrough for designing a complete informational website and for assessing website usability, parameterizing the walkthrough to validly simulate diverse user groups. The walkthrough was developed to facilitate the design of applications with GUIs that enable users to discover by exploration how to perform new tasks, simulating user behavior step-by-step for a given task on a given walk-up-and-use interface. Navigation is guided by the information scentific assigned a stronger value to the desired goal toward the target web page in the cognitive walkthrough of a website (CWW). CWW relies on Latent Semantic Analysis to objectively estimate the degree of semantic similarity (information scent) between representative user goal statements and heading/link texts on each web page, and to assess the probability that a particular user group can effectively learn from texts they discovered by navigating the website. A series of experiments will first parameterize the CWW for college-educated users navigating informational/instructional websites and then parameterize the CWW to validly simulate navigation behaviors of diverse user groups, including users with 6th-, 9th-, and 12th-grade reading levels in English.