The highest-ranked useful document was result #4:
In this study, Webster and Ahuja investigated user disorientation on websites and concluded that there are a couple of concrete ways that web designers can minimize disorientation (and thus frustration, giving up, and other problems) on a multi-page website:
1. Design each page so that the navigation bar is always in view no matter where on the page the user is (for example, if you have a page where the user may scroll down, have the navigation bar move down as the user scrolls so that it stays visible)
2. Have your navigation system use a 'tree' design rather than a 'bar' design: that is, present a small number of initial choices to the user, each of which has its own set of follow-up choices, rather than presenting a large number of more specific choices all at once.
Other promising results that this search produced were:
Critical Design Ethnography: Designing for Change
Sasha A. Barab, Michael K. Thomas, Tyler Dodge, Kurt Squire, Markeda Newell
Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 254-268
Sasha A. Barab, Michael K. Thomas, Tyler Dodge, Kurt Squire, Markeda Newell
Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 254-268
Understanding the Impact of Web Personalization on User Information Processing and Decision Outcomes
Kar Yan Tam, Shuk Ying Ho
Factors Affecting Web Site Visit Duration: A Cross-Domain Analysis
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 43, No. 2 (May, 2006), pp. 182-194
The JSTOR search was fairly simple to conduct because I am in the early stages of gathering information on web design. So, like a student who just needs 'a bibliography of ten sources, any ten,' almost anything I find on the topic will be relevant and useful to me. However, I still learned important lessons from this search. The most significant thing I learned was the usefulness of the fact that JSTOR classifies its included journals by discipline and allows you to use this fact to limit your search. My biggest problem with the search for 'web design' was that JSTOR is a large multi-subject database and that 'web' and 'design' are common words that are meaningful in multiple contexts. My initial search was undermined by this fact and returned a lot of biology articles about spiders. The ability to limit which parts of the database were searched (which as far as I know is unique to JSTOR among similar multidisciplinary databases) enabled me to search JSTOR as though it were a subject-specific database enough though in fact it is not. This limiter was the key in going from mostly irrelevant to mainly relevant results. Once I had narrowed down the search to discipline-specific journal collections it was a fairly simple matter to refine the search further in order to collect some relevant documents.
The JSTOR search was fairly simple to conduct because I am in the early stages of gathering information on web design. So, like a student who just needs 'a bibliography of ten sources, any ten,' almost anything I find on the topic will be relevant and useful to me. However, I still learned important lessons from this search. The most significant thing I learned was the usefulness of the fact that JSTOR classifies its included journals by discipline and allows you to use this fact to limit your search. My biggest problem with the search for 'web design' was that JSTOR is a large multi-subject database and that 'web' and 'design' are common words that are meaningful in multiple contexts. My initial search was undermined by this fact and returned a lot of biology articles about spiders. The ability to limit which parts of the database were searched (which as far as I know is unique to JSTOR among similar multidisciplinary databases) enabled me to search JSTOR as though it were a subject-specific database enough though in fact it is not. This limiter was the key in going from mostly irrelevant to mainly relevant results. Once I had narrowed down the search to discipline-specific journal collections it was a fairly simple matter to refine the search further in order to collect some relevant documents.
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