"Investigating the Effect of Site Organisation on Memory Recall"

Supervised by A.Sharkey

Abstract

The main purpose for the World Wide Web is the transfer of information in a similar way to the purpose of a library of books. However it is clear that there are many factors that can effect the efficiency of this transfer of information from the web page to the users memory. In order to make their web sites as effective as possible, web designers must aim to optimise all these factors to make their sites as efficient as possible.

This project investigates the effect of organisation and layout of the information on the amount of information that the users of the site can absorb. The investigation looks at three possible layouts. The three differing layouts are a site with the minimum number of web pages to display the information, a site with an average number of web pages to display the information and a web site with a maximum number of web pages to display the information. One of these should provide an estimate of the optimum number of web pages for this site.

In conclusion, the results found that a moderate amount of web pages yielded the highest amount of recognition by a significant value indicating that the layout of information is a highly important design issue. Although a number of failings in the testing process have become apparent whilst completing the project, the results appear to conclusively state that it may be possible to define an optimum number of pages for a web site. This value is dependent on the amount of data stored in it as well as the type of information the web site is about.