Experimental Studies on Web, Music and Blog Interfaces
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Experimental Studies on Web, Music and Blog Interfaces Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Sciences (By Research) in Computer Science by Anupama Gali 200502002 [email protected] Cognitive Science International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad - 500 032, India April 2011 Copyright c Anupama Gali, 2011 All Rights Reserved International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, India CERTIFICATE It is certified that the work contained in this thesis, titled “Experimental Studies on Web, Music and Blog Interfaces” by Anupama Gali, has been carried out under my supervision and is not submitted elsewhere for a degree. Date Adviser: Prof. BIPIN INDURKHYA To Brother - Venkat Ramesh Gali, and Parents - Rama Padma Gali and K V R Sarma Gali Acknowledgments Firstly, I would thank my parents without whose encouragement and support I would not have been able to write this. I consider myself to be very lucky for having done by graduation and post-graduation in a prestigious institution like IIIT, Hyderabad. While dual-degree is one safe option to obtain MS from home land, it is also quite demanding because the whole work needs to be completed in 1-1.5 years. Very unsure yet determined, I worked with Dr. Kamal in Data engineering lab to explore various research problems and take up one of them as my masters thesis problem. I thank him for his patience and agreeing to my request to move to cognitive science lab and work in the field of cognition. Dr. Bipin gave a warm welcome and complete independence to choose among various research topics. I was completely surprised and fascinated to learn about various kinds of research going on in this field. While the class room lectures gave a subtle idea of how this field would be, Amitash and Saraschandra, two PhD candidates helped in every way to learn the topics in detail. Internship with Rediff.com is another milestone that actually gave shape to my research work. Smt. Vaishnavi Narayanan helped me to learn designing usability tasks and preparing questionnaires. She also supported me emotionally with her kind words and suggestions with the help of which I could publish my first international research paper. Again I thank Dr. Bipin for sending me to that conference to learn more about the ongoing work in this field. Attending that conference and presenting my work in front of so many learned people has cultivated some motivation in me to work harder. My heartfelt gratitude to Prof. Catherine, the conference chair whom I met there, for encouraging me a lot in the conference. I must really thank Gopala Krishna, my friend and fellow student in lab who has proposed some collaborative work on interfaces to visualize similarity in music data. This new idea inspired me and helped me to learn about another new research problem- faceted navigation and its difficulties. We worked together in designing the interface and I took that work a step further by implementing and evaluating it. Gopal had supported me in every work I did, both emotionally and professionally. I, being an ardent reader of blogs, have always wondered if there could be some help in knowing some information about other readers’ responses on a post without completely going through them. This motivated me to work on blogs and comments. The literature study I have done has proved to be very helpful to learn about the varied research going on and my experimental studies helped me to learn how to design, conduct, collect and analyze various results. I duly thank Dr.Bipin for permitting me to explore whatever I was interested in. With the v vi knowledge I have gained, I am sure I will be able to continue my research in this field more comfortably in a focused manner. Finally, Thanks to my friends Gopal, Bharat, Divya and Harshita who had encouraged me and backed me up when I was in need. I am very much thankful to Saraschandra Karanam for his valuable sugges- tions and guidance. I would not forget the long discussion I, Amitash and Saraschandra had regarding analysis of some results. It is probably one of the longest and best professional discussions I had with them. Thank you everyone for everything! Abstract Human Computer Interaction and usability have become increasingly important with the advent of the Internet and its emergence as means of communication,e-commerce and social networking. A user friendly website will attract more readers thus increasing the number of loyal visitors. As a result, the need for presenting information in an attractive and usable manner is significant. Web usability of a website is a measure of how intuitive the presentation of its contents are. A variety of techniques like heuristic evaluation, expert reviews, performance evaluation have been developed to measure usabil- ity and correlate this to end-user results like increase/decrease in visitors, increase/decrease in errors performed while doing some tasks on the webpage etc. This thesis is a compendium of three different experiments each on webpage elements, navigation in music data and polarity of comments in blog articles respectively. Present experimental studies mainly focus on the semantic influence of text links and the impact of graphical conventions and layout lo- cations. Comparatively, less work has been done on interaction in between web page elements. An experiment to test whether there exist any interdependencies in between location expectations of web widgets is conducted. This experiment also includes an eye-tracking study whose results can be used to determine the blind spots of each widget in a webpage. Based on the results obtained from this experiment, conclusions are made to establish the interdependencies. It is noticed that out of the 4 wid- gets (Search, Navigation pane, Ads and Login) that we’ve considered, location expectations of two of them (Navigation pane and Ads) are found to be independent of any other widget whereas the other two (Search and Login) are found to be dependent on main content and navigation pane of the page respectively. Such findings when followed as heuristics can be used in developing new websites to help users search for dependent widgets when the location of a widget is known. Another study includes the design,implementation and evaluation of a web model that helps in searching and browsing through huge music data catalog. The fundamentals of faceted navigation are used to build this model which groups the music data based on the similarity in their features rather than metadata. We named this web model as REM which expands to Ray Exploration Model. As the name suggests, it conceptualizes the depth of each attribute in the data and breadth across the attributes in an easily navigable sun model with its rays. Together suns and rays form a network using relations between the values of attributes. REM caters to search needs of a user without the limitations of the popular keyword based search approaches. This model is implemented using Raphael JS graphics and is evaluated using a usability evaluation method called ‘performance measurement’. Results from this vii viii evaluation are used to know the user satisfaction with the model and suggestions/improvements that can be made. The usability evaluation of our model shows that users were majorly happy with its function- ality and aesthetic appearance of the interface. Suggestions on navigating back to a page were noted and these changes are made to the model so that it complies with them. A final study includes an experiment to test the effect of polarity of social interaction history on users reading blogs. Previous studies report that the number of comments on a blog article play a role in attracting readers- users’ interest in an article increases with the number of comments . The type of comments that contribute to the total number is not considered. It is hypothesized that the type of comments (polarity) on a blog post effect the user’s interest in a blog. In the main experiment, the participants were asked to read a set of posts belonging to four different categories in two conditions- presence and absence of polarity of comments. They were also asked to rate the posts on a scale of 5 given the polarity distribution of comments. This data from the experiment was statistically analyzed using one-way ANOVA and paired values t-test measures respectively. The varied results show that the polarity of comments affects readers interest for blogs categorized as ‘technology’ and did not play much role for the other two categories (‘neuroscience’,‘polarity’ and ‘war’). Further, for the posts belonging to ‘technology’ category ,it was also noticed that posts with major negative comments were liked by more readers than posts with major positive comments. Thus,to conclude, polarity of comments was found to effect reader’s interest in blog articles based on the type of posts. One immediate extension to this study is to conduct it on a variety of participants to see if the results are governed by the readers’ background/knowledge. Contents Chapter Page 1 Introduction .......................................... 1 1.1 Introduction to Usability . 1 1.1.1 Web usability definition . 2 1.1.2 Why is web usability important . 3 1.2 Outline of this thesis . 3 2 Interdependencies in Location Expectations of Web Widgets ................. 6 2.1 Introduction........................................ 6 2.2 Relatedwork ....................................... 6 2.3 Hypothesisproposed ................................. 8 2.4 Method of the experiment . 8 2.4.1 Participants . 8 2.4.2 Apparatus .................................... 8 2.4.3 Design ...................................... 11 2.4.3.1 Behavioralstudy ........................... 11 2.4.3.2 Eye tracking study . 11 2.4.4 Tasks ....................................... 11 2.4.5 Variables ....................................