Most Web portals and other online services use menu structures to present their contents. Given the increasing use of the Web for everyday activities, it is important to assess the design strategies of web menus and their adequacy with the user?s needs. The study presented here was carried out within the framework of a longitudinal study over two years and related to the uses of the Internet. Our objective was to examine the influence of individual factors and three different menu designs on the effectiveness of an information search task.
The participants were fifty voluntary adults, representative of the population of a mid-size French town. They were divided into three different age groups (younger, intermediate and older adults). They were asked to perform a series of twelve search tasks using three types of hierarchical web menus. Menu structure (deep, broad-alphabetic and broad-categorized), and question length and implicitness were manipulated in a within-subject design. The subjects? choices for each question, search time and success were recorded via a web database.
Older adults tended to show poorer performance, especially with deep menus. Longer and implicit questions also led to poorer performance for the whole group of participants. Finally, a significant relation was observed between subjects? visuo-spatial capacity and their performance with search tasks using explicit key words.
This experiment provided evidence that locating relevant categories in a hierarchical menu structure is far from a trivial task for general public adult. We discuss possible implications of these results for individual and task-related factors of information search performance.