Effects of cognitively designed home pages with readers' prior knowledge on the web

The purpose of our ongoing efforts is to investigate the influence of web page design based on text-structure and user prior knowledge for information retrieval on the basis of navigation accuracy, speed, quality and memorization. We hypothesized that cognitively designed web home page may help low prior knowledge students organize their representation of text contents of web page. Two types of web pages are classified, differing in structure of home pages (cognitive vs. non-cognitive home page) with two kinds of users (high knowledge vs. low knowledge). In all conditions, subjects were allowed 30 minutes to navigate freely. After first navigation session, they were asked to draw a site map. Then subjects filled out the questionnaire for reading comprehension, accuracy and quality in second navigation followed by drawing a site map viewed. The cognitively designed home page helped both (low prior knowledge) LK students and (high prior knowledge) HK students. We compare the effects of comprehension accuracy, comprehension speed, quality of comprehension and navigation quality of cognitively and non-cognitively designed home page with reader’s level of prior knowledge. The findings combine suggest that the cognitively designed home page is appropriate for both high and low prior knowledge subjects, probably because this way of designing aids a clear and broad insight into the organizational structure of the whole web site. The results are interpreted to support our hypotheses.