Abstract:
Web applications have rapidly become critical to the
interaction that organisations have with their external
stakeholders. A major factor in the effectiveness of this
interaction is the ease with which navigation within the
application can occur, and especially the extent to which
users can locate information and functionality which they
are seeking. Effective design is however complicated by
the multiple purposes and users which Web applications
typically support. Despite the fact that this implies that
navigation design is inherently an optimisation problem,
few optimisation techniques have been applied in this
domain – with most design techniques being based on
intuition, general heuristics, or experimental refinement.
In this paper we discuss this problem, and propose a
navigation representation which can become the basis for
optimisation techniques.
