Improving Web site design

Abstract

Using quantitative measures of the informational, navigational, and graphical aspects of a Web site, a quality checker aims to help nonprofessional designers improve their Web sites. As part of the WebTango project, we explore automated approaches for helping designers improve their sites. Our goal is to create an interactive tool that helps steer occasional Web site builders away from bad designs and toward better ones - a "quality checker" tool, analogous to a grammar checker in a word processor. What distinguishes our work from most others is that this tool is based on empirically derived measures computed over thousands of Web pages. We converted these measures, which characterize the informational, navigational, and graphical aspects of a Web site, into profiles for a variety of site types. Our rudimentary design-checking tool uses these profiles to assess Web site designs; future versions will also suggest design improvements.