Why We Read Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with millions of users relying on it to satisfy a broad range of information needs every day. Although it is crucial to understand what exactly these needs are in order to be able to meet them, little is currently known about why users visit Wikipedia. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap by combining a survey of Wikipedia readers with a log-based analysis of user activity. Based on an initial series of user surveys, we build a taxonomy of Wikipedia use cases along several dimensions, capturing users' motivations to visit Wikipedia, the depth of knowledge they are seeking, and their knowledge of the topic of interest prior to visiting Wikipedia. Then, we quantify the prevalence of these use cases via a large-scale user survey conducted on live Wikipedia with almost 30,000 responses. Our analyses highlight the variety of factors driving users to Wikipedia, such as current events, media coverage of a topic, personal curiosity, work or school assignments, or boredom. Finally, we match survey responses to the respondents' digital traces in Wikipedia's server logs, enabling the discovery of behavioral patterns associated with specific use cases. For instance, we observe long and fast-paced page sequences across topics for users who are bored or exploring randomly, whereas those using Wikipedia for work or school spend more time on individual articles focused on topics such as science. Our findings advance our understanding of reader motivations and behavior on Wikipedia and can have implications for developers aiming to improve Wikipedia's user experience, editors striving to cater to their readers' needs, third-party services (such as search engines) providing access to Wikipedia content, and researchers aiming to build tools such as recommendation engines.Comment: Published in WWW'17; v2 fixes caption of Table

Intentions and perceptions : the emerging gaps between web system designers and users

In recent years, organisations have been increasingly developing web systems as portals through which B2C or B2B eCommerce is conducted. Many such systems suffer from inadequacy in function, form and quality. While such deficiencies are quite commonly encountered in traditional software systems, in the case of web systems, the problems are magnified by the emerging gaps in designers\u27 intentions and the expectation of a global, and frequently grossly misunderstood, user. In this paper we therefore present an approach to investigating the gaps in perceptions between web developer&rsquo;s intentions and end-users expectations and the subsequent use of web system features. Furthermore, we empirically investigated B2C web systems and determined several useful approaches to practical evaluation of the degree of cohesion between designer and user views of the system.<br /

Usability and functionality evaluation of the most profitable Croatian companies’ web sites

The most commonly used form of Internet presence for a company is its official web site. Business web sites have been used since the beginning of Internet development in its early stages. As the Web space has been changing over time in quality, quantity and capabilities, so have its business web sites as well. It is a known fact that web site quality varies as well as its usability and functionality. Having that in mind, there is an obvious need to systematically analyze and evaluate business oriented web sites. Both theoreticians and practitioners agree on the basic evaluation components of web site analysis in general. However, there is no single widely accepted performance evaluation model of business web sites. The aim of the paper is to analyze and evaluate web sites of 190 most profitable Croatian companies in different economic sections (sectors). The paper is focused on web site usability and functionality from the user perspective. Usability and functionality is measured in order to compare business web sites and assess their performance

Методология Оценки Качества Веб-Сайта Универсальная Звезда: первая вершина – «Содержание»

The Internet continues to grow at a fast pace with over 1.5 billion websites in 2019 as compared with only one in 1991. The emergence of enormous websites of various complexities and types makes assessing the quality of these sites a vastly important, difficult and complicated task. With this concern, the current paper proposes a novel approach for website assessment by developing a new Website Quality Evaluation Methodology Universal Star (WQEMUS) with a theoretical and empirical basis. It became possible through the employment of the  grounded  theory  methodology  that  enables  relevant  concepts  to  emerge  from  data. To improve the reliability and validity of the findings, an extensive literature review, in-depth and qualitative interviews, and a user evaluation survey were conducted and associated together. In this way, the study presents the results of the selection and categorization of generic quality attributes for WQEMUS with a three-tier structure, consisting of top-level quality criteria, sub-criteria and indicators. These quality dimensions are grounded on a combination of subjective and objective indicators. Consequently, WQEMUS becomes capable of estimating a wide range of different websites irrespective of domain affiliation and services they provide, including Web 3.0 sites.Интернет продолжает расти быстрыми темпами, более чем 1,5 млрд веб-сайтов в2019 г. по сравнению только с одним в1991 г. Появление огромных веб-сайтов различной сложности и типов делает оценку качества этих сайтов чрезвычайно важной и трудной задачей. В связи с этим в статье представлен новый подход к оценке веб-сайтов путем разработки новой Методологии Оценки Качества Веб-Сайтов Универсальная Звезда (МОКВУЗ) на теоретической и эмпирической основе. Чтобы повысить надежность и достоверность результатов исследования, были приведены обширный обзор литературы, углубленные и качественные интервью и оценки пользователей. Таким образом, в статье представлены результаты отбора и  категоризации общих  атрибутов качества для МОКВУЗ с трехуровневой структурой, состоящей из критериев качества высшего уровня, субкритериев и показателей. Эти аспекты качества основаны на сочетании субъективных и объективных показателей. Следовательно, МОКВУЗ становится способной оценивать широкий спектр различных веб-сайтов независимо от принадлежности к домену и предоставляемых ими услуг, включая сайты Веб 3.0

Web Site Analysis: A Review and Assessment of Previous Research

The emergence of the World Wide Web as a major communication and transaction channel stresses the preeminent importance of a company\u27s Web site for representing the organization, interacting with customers and conducting transactions. In comparison to other channels, the opportunities for targeting specific market segments are somehow limited, due to the Internet\u27s worldwide reach and predominantly anonymous users. Additionally, an ever-increasing number of customers are going online, which prevents the fine tuning of a site for specific user groups. Therefore, it seems essential that organizations possessing Web presence should be well aware of their site\u27s general functionality and how it is perceived by Internet users. For many years the analysis of Web sites has been one of the major topics for both scholars and practitioners, which led to a huge number of different techniques being used for the evaluation of sites. Furthermore, a variety of different theories and models have been developed which include the effects of Web sites as dependent or independent variables. In this paper, I compare different approaches to Web site analysis and present a classification framework. Numerous examples will be given to illustrate the various dimensions of the framework. Furthermore, benefits and drawbacks of the respective methods will be discussed where applicable. The results provide important insights into the current state of the art of Web analysis and will be supportive for anyone planning to conduct a Web analysis as well as for someone who is interested in getting an overview of the research field

A Usability Inspection Method for Model-driven Web Development Processes

Las aplicaciones Web son consideradas actualmente un elemento esencial e indispensable en toda actividad empresarial, intercambio de información y motor de redes sociales. La usabilidad, en este tipo de aplicaciones, es reconocida como uno de los factores clave más importantes, puesto que la facilidad o dificultad que los usuarios experimentan con estas aplicaciones determinan en gran medida su éxito o fracaso. Sin embargo, existen varias limitaciones en las propuestas actuales de evaluación de usabilidad Web, tales como: el concepto de usabilidad sólo se soporta parcialmente, las evaluaciones de usabilidad se realizan principalmente cuando la aplicación Web se ha desarrollado, hay una carencia de guías sobre cómo integrar adecuadamente la usabilidad en el desarrollo Web, y también existe una carencia de métodos de evaluación de la usabilidad Web que hayan sido validados empíricamente. Además, la mayoría de los procesos de desarrollo Web no aprovechan los artefactos producidos en las fases de diseño. Estos artefactos software intermedios se utilizan principalmente para guiar a los desarrolladores y para documentar la aplicación Web, pero no para realizar evaluaciones de usabilidad. Dado que la trazabilidad entre estos artefactos y la aplicación Web final no está bien definida, la realización de evaluaciones de usabilidad de estos artefactos resulta difícil. Este problema se mitiga en el desarrollo Web dirigido por modelos (DWDM), donde los artefactos intermedios (modelos) que representan diferentes perspectivas de una aplicación Web, se utilizan en todas las etapas del proceso de desarrollo, y el código fuente final se genera automáticamente a partir estos modelos. Al tener en cuenta la trazabilidad entre estos modelos, la evaluación de estos modelos permite detectar problemas de usabilidad que experimentaran los usuarios finales de la aplicación Web final, y proveer recomendaciones para corregir estos problemas de usabilidad durante fases tempranas del proceso de desarrollo Web. Esta tesis tiene como objetivo, tratando las anteriores limitaciones detectadas, el proponer un método de inspección de usabilidad que se puede integrar en diferentes procesos de desarrollo Web dirigido por modelos. El método se compone de un modelo de usabilidad Web que descompone el concepto de usabilidad en sub-características, atributos y métricas genéricas, y un proceso de evaluación de usabilidad Web (WUEP), que proporciona directrices sobre cómo el modelo de usabilidad se puede utilizar para llevar a cabo evaluaciones específicas. Las métricas genéricas del modelo de usabilidad deben operacionalizarse con el fin de ser aplicables a los artefactos software de diferentes métodos de desarrollo Web y en diferentes niveles de abstracción, lo que permite evaluar la usabilidad en varias etapas del proceso de desarrollo Web, especialmente en las etapas tempranas. Tanto el modelo de usabilidad como el proceso de evaluación están alineados con la última norma ISO/IEC 25000 estándar para la evaluación de la calidad de productos de software (SQuaRE). El método de inspección de usabilidad propuesto (WUEP) se ha instanciado en dos procesos de desarrollo Web dirigido por modelos diferentes (OO-H y WebML) a fin de demostrar la factibilidad de nuestra propuesta. Además, WUEP fue validado empíricamente mediante la realización de una familia de experimentos en OO-H y un experimento controlado en WebML. El objetivo de nuestros estudios empíricos fue evaluar la efectividad, la eficiencia, facilidad de uso percibida y la satisfacción percibida de los participantes; cuando utilizaron WUEP en comparación con un método de inspección industrial ampliamente utilizado: La Evaluación Heurística (HE). El análisis estadístico y meta-análisis de los datos obtenidos por separado de cada experimento indicaron que WUEP es más eficaz y eficiente que HE en la detección de problemas de usabilidad. Los evaluadores también percibieron más satisfacción cuando se aplicaron WUEP, y lesFernández Martínez, A. (2012). A Usability Inspection Method for Model-driven Web Development Processes [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/17845Palanci

Usability evaluation framework for e-commerce websites in developing countries

The importance of evaluating the usability of e-commerce websites is well recognised and this area has attracted research attention for more than a decade. Nearly all the studies that evaluated the usability of e-commerce websites employed either user-based (i.e. user testing) or evaluator-based (i.e. heuristic evaluation) usability evaluation methods; but no research has employed softwarebased (i.e. Google Analytics software) in the evaluation of such sites. Furthermore, the studies which employed user testing and/or heuristic evaluation methods in the evaluation of the usability of e-commerce websites did not offer detail about the benefits and drawbacks of these methods with respect to the identification of specific types of usability problems. This research developed a methodological framework for the usability evaluation of e-commerce websites which involved user testing and heuristic evaluation methods together with Google Analytics software. The framework was developed by comparing the benefits and drawbacks of these methods in terms of the specific areas of usability problems that they could or could not identify on ecommerce websites. The framework involves Google Analytics software as a preliminary step to provide a quick, easy and cheap indication of general potential usability problem areas on an e-commerce website and its specific pages. Then, the framework enables evaluators to choose other methods to provide in-depth detail about specific iv problems on the site. For instance, the framework suggests that user testing is good for identifying specific major usability problems related to four areas: navigation, design, the purchasing process and accessibility and customer service, while the heuristic evaluation is good for identifying a large number of specific minor usability problems related to eight areas including: navigation, internal search, the site architecture, the content, the design, accessibility and customer service, inconsistency and missing capabilities. The framework also suggests that the heuristic evaluation is good at identifying major security and privacy problems. The framework was developed based on an extensive evaluation of the effectiveness of the three methods in identifying specific usability problems in three case studies (e-commerce websites) in Jordan. This highlighted the usefulness of the methods and therefore helps e-commerce retailers to determine the usability method that best matches their needs. The framework was tested and the results indicated the usefulness of the suggested framework in raising awareness of usability and usability evaluation methods among e-commerce retailers in Jordan. This will help them address usability in the design of their websites, thus helping them to survive, grow and achieve success.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Analysis of obligatory disclosure regarding individual’s privacy

Disclosure of personal information online has raised concerns about individuals’ privacy. In order to protect personal information users undertake measures, such as configuring privacy settings and referring to the privacy policies of the organisation’s website before engaging in a transaction. This demonstrates users’ concerns with the availability of their personal information online. Besides the individuals themselves, organisations are also exposing the personal information of their staff to the general public by publishing it on their official website. The practice of publishing employees’ information on such websites is nominally to offer better services to customers, and it is one of the steps taken to improve governmental transparency. However, there are only limited studies on individuals’ (i.e. employees’) privacy issues in the context of organisational disclosure, and their internal responses to the relevant factors. To date, far too little attention has been paid to the disclosure of personal information by organisational websites. This research addresses this phenomenon, where the issue of third-party disclosure by an entity that has a direct relationship with the individuals is investigated in the Malaysian context. For this purpose, this research introduces ‘obligatory disclosure’ as a conceptual framework for this study and adds to the knowledge of privacy-in-public in the context of public administration. The results of the study indicate that while obligatory disclosure was commonly believed to be a normal phenomenon, it creates a vulnerable environment for individuals. The study also found that employees’ concerns with privacy were influenced by the specific context. In addition, low levels of privacy concern and lack of privacy awareness regarding this phenomenon were identified. The study recommends that there is a need for a regulatory approach to protect employees’ information on organisation websites, and privacy should be incorporated as an important element of obligatory disclosure practice

Context-Driven Assessment of Commercial Web Sites

Companies seeking to achieve significant benefits through e-business need to create an effective and usable web presence to ensure successful interaction and communication with their employee, partners and customers. Despite the wealth of information available on web ease-of-use or usability, there is no standard, allencompassing framework defining web site effectiveness. Hence it is difficult to measure usability from a qualitative and especially quantitative perspective. In this paper, we examine various approaches to assessing Web site effectiveness and usability, and then present a three-dimensional approach that takes into account the context of the site and its functionality within that context. 1