A STUDY ON THE ROLE OF NON-HYPERLINK TEXT ON WEB NAVIGATION

Cognitive models of web navigation have been used for evaluating websitesand predicting user navigation behavior. Currently they predict the correcthyperlink by using information from the hyperlink text alone and ignore allother textual information on a webpage. The validity of this assumption isexamined by investigating the role of non-hyperlink text on user navigationbehavior. In the first experiment, we created two versions of a website byremoving the non-hyperlink text from it. We found that there was no significanteffect of non-hyperlink text on the user navigation behavior. Participants wereequally accurate, selected the same set of pages to visit and spent the sameamount of time on that common set with or without non-hyperlink text. Thisresult validates the assumptions of those models of user-navigation behaviorthat consider information from the hyperlink text only. However, in a followupexperiment, we included high-relevance and low-relevance pictures on thewebsite, and repeated the experiment with and without non-hyperlink text.We found that participants were more accurate in the presence of non-hyperlinktext than without it. This result suggests that the presence of pictures mightprime the users to pay attention to non-hyperlink text, which increases the taskaccuracy