Chercher des informations dans les menus web : interaction entre tâche, type de menu et variables individuelles

Résumé Fr En

RÉSUMÉ Cette étude avait pour objectif d’examiner l’influence de variables individuelles et des choix de conception des menus web sur l’efficacité de la recherche d’informations. Cinquante utilisateurs d’Internet volontaires, répartis en trois groupes d’âge différents, ont réalisé une série de douze tâches de recherche de catégories cibles dans trois types de menus web hiérarchiques. La complexité des questions ainsi que la largeur et la profondeur des menus ont été manipulées. Les résultats montrent que les participants les plus âgés ont réalisé les moins bonnes performances, notamment lors de l’utilisation du menu profond. De plus, les questions longues et inférentielles ont entraîné les moins bonnes performances pour l’ensemble des participants. Nous proposons ici une discussion des implications possibles de ces résultats du point de vue des facteurs individuels et des facteurs liés à la tâche de recherche d’informations.

LOCATING RELEVANT CATEGORIES IN WEB MENUS : EFFECTS OF TASK COMPLEXITY, MENU STRUCTURE AND INDIVIDUAL FACTORS Most Web portals and other online services use menu structures to present their contents. Given the increasing use of the Web for everyday activities, it is important to assess the design strategies of web menus and their adequacy with the user’s needs. The study presented here was carried out within the framework of a longitudinal study over two years and related to the uses of the Internet. Our objective was to examine the influence of individual factors and three different menu designs on the effectiveness of an information search task. The participants were fifty voluntary adults, representative of the population of a mid-size French town. They were divided into three different age groups (younger, intermediate and older adults). They were asked to perform a series of twelve search tasks using three types of hierarchical web menus. Menu structure (deep, broad-alphabetic and broad-categorized), and question length and implicitness were manipulated in a within-subject design. The subjects’ choices for each question, search time and success were recorded via a web database. Older adults tended to show poorer performance, especially with deep menus. Longer and implicit questions also led to poorer performance for the whole group of participants. Finally, a significant relation was observed between subjects’ visuo-spatial capacity and their performance with search tasks using explicit key words. This experiment provided evidence that locating relevant categories in a hierarchical menu structure is far from a trivial task for general public adult. We discuss possible implications of these results for individual and task-related factors of information search performance.