A Heuristic Based Approach for Improving Website Link Structure and Navigation

Abstract

As web sites evolve over time, their complexity in both the content and the link structure also tend to increase, hence, causing disorientation and cognitive overload on the user side. User traversals tend to become more cumbersome, and information get hidden deep inside long chains of web pages and links. As a result, we need more creative design features to allow automatic and dynamic improvement of web site link structure. This paper describes a set of heuristics to optimize the web site usability and link structure. In particular, we show how these heuristics can be used to (1) simplify the user navigational needs through automatically reducing the transient links and hence providing shortcuts to pages in demand, and (2) automatically provide users with redirects to popular pages in the web site. These heuristics are hoped to compliment previously reported graph-based techniques for web site link optimization.