Showing papers by "James E. Pitkow published in 1995"

Characterizing browsing strategies in the World-Wide Web

Abstract: This paper presents the results of a study conducted at Georgia Institute of Technology that captured client-side user events of NCSA's XMosaic. Actual user behavior, as determined from client-side log file analysis, supplemented our understanding of user navigation strategies as well as provided real interface usage data. Log file analysis also yielded design and usability suggestions for WWW pages, sites and browsers. The methodology of the study and findings are discussed along with future research directions.

Using the Web as a survey tool: results from the second WWW user survey

Abstract: This paper presents the initial results from the second World-Wide Web User Survey, which was advertised and made available to the Web user population for 38 days during October and November 1994. The survey is built on our architecture and Web technologies, which together offer a number of technical and surveying advantages. In particular, our architecture supports the use of adaptive questions, and supports methods for tracking users' responses across different surveys, allowing more in-depth analyses of survey responses. The present survey was composed of three question categories: general demographic questions, browsing usage, and questions for Web information authors. In addition, we added an additional, experimental category addressing users' attitudes toward commercial use of the Web and the Internet. In just over one month, we received over 18000 total responses to the combined surveys. To the best of our knowledge, the number of respondents and range of questions make this survey the most reliable and comprehensive characterization of WWW users to date. It will be interesting to see if and how the user trends shown in our results change as the Web gains in global access and popularity.

Towards an intelligent publishing environment

Abstract: This paper presents an environment for publishing information on the World-Wide Web (WWW). Previous work has pointed out that the explosive growth of the WWW is in part due to the ease with which information can be made available to Web users [23]. Yet this property can have negative impacts on the ability to find appropriate information as well as on the integrity of the information published. We present a prototype environment that facilitates the publishing of documents on the Web by automatically generating meta-information about the document, communicating this to a local scalable architecture, e.g. WHOIS + +, verifying the document's HTML compliance, maintaining referential integrity within the local database, and placing the document in a Web accessible area. Additionally, maintenance and versioning facilities are provided. This paper first discusses an idealized publishing environment, then describes our implementation, followed by a discussion of salient issues and future research areas.