Web page previews: effect on comprehension, user perceptions, and site exploration

Informational websites that contain pages of related hyperlinked information are often organized in a hierarchical tree, such that child-node pages contain the primary content and higher level parent-node pages link to sets of related childnode pages. In such designs, the parent-node page content can act as topic previews for the content contained in their child pages. This paper describes a 3 x 2 factorial experiment that examined the effect of preview styles (preview paragraphs with embedded child-node links, preview paragraphs with a list of child-node links below them, a list of childnode links only) and hierarchical navigation menus (present or absent) on website users’ reading comprehension, perceptions of user experience, and site exploration behaviour. Significant differences were found for inferential reading comprehension, with higher comprehension occurring when readers were exposed to previews with embedded links even though previews with embedded links negatively affected user perceptions. Presence or absence of hierarchical menus did not affect comprehension but lack of menus significantly degraded usability perceptions and site exploration. Recommendations for informational website designs are discussed based on these findings.