The Impact of Web Site Familiarity on User Performance When Critical Navigation Links Change

Abstract

The research in this paper examines the effect of web site familiarity on the impact of small changes in a site’s primary navigation structure on user performance. Ninety-two participants performed multiple tasks on a web site, and then returned to the site either immediately or after a three-week delay to perform one of the original tasks again. Half the users had the critical navigation link on the first task, while half did not. On the second visit, the presence or absence of the link either remained consistent, or was the opposite of the condition experienced during their first visit. The addition of multiple tasks during the user’s first visit to the website was expected to cause the memory of the path to the target to be less salient during subsequent visits, thus reducing the performance increase observed in prior studies. However, results show that web site familiarity did not have a significant effect on user performance in this task. One likely explanation for this finding is that there is a trade-off between the salience created for the correct information path gained by performing a single-task first visit and the familiarity gained through multiple forays through the site as the result of multiple task completion.