A formative evaluation method for designing WWW sites

Since 1995, the World Wide Web has grown exponentially, with thousands of individuals, businesses and organizations developing and posting home pages. Some companies and organizations invest thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours developing highly artistic and visually-pleasing pages only to discover that their users become lost when navigating their site, have trouble reading the on-screen text and cannot find the information they seek. Consequently, users never return to their Web site. While numerous authors provide HTML tagging guidelines for developing Web pages, few authors have provided research-based guidelines from information design, interface design, hypertext, legibility and related research. To make Web pages more effective, developers can turn to (1) communication science-based guidelines for enhancing Web site design, and (2) formative evaluation methods. In our presentation, we outline a formative evaluation methodology to help Web page authors improve their Web pages, and illustrate the process with findings from our Web design research that began in 1994.