Web page previews: effect on comprehension, user perceptions, and site exploration

Informational websites that contain pages of related hyperlinked information are often organized in a hierarchical tree, such that child-node pages contain primary content and higher-level parent-node pages link to sets of related child-node pages. In such designs, the parent-node page content can act as topic previews for content contained in their child pages. This article describes a 3 x 2 factorial experiment that examined the effect of preview styles and hierarchical navigation menus on website users' reading comprehension, perceptions of user experience and site exploration behaviour. Significant differences were found for inferential reading comprehension, with higher comprehension occurring when readers were exposed to previews with embedded links, even though previews with embedded links negatively affected user perceptions. Presence or absence of hierarchical menus did not affect comprehension but lack of menus significantly degraded usability perceptions and site exploration. Recommendations for informational website designs are discussed based on these findings.