Opinions on Weblinks

Abstract

This document provides a concrete version of the survey used in the URL reading experiment conducted in April 2017 and reported in the associated paper to appear at CHI'20 on 25 April, 2020. This documentation serves two purposes. First, it helps readers of the associated paper to perceive what the experiment participants have seen. Second, it provides more concrete details than the main paper to enable accurate replications of the experiment by interested researchers. Researchers who wish to use this survey in replication studies are encouraged to read the design rationale in the associated paper. The document presents the 46 fictitious Unified Resource Locators (URL) designed to empirically evaluate web users ability to read URLs and the exact wording of the associated multiple-choice questions. Each URL is associated with two questions: where this URL goes and how safe it is to click on it. These 46 URL trials systematically vary the URL structure, the number and brand names appearing in the URL and the position of the brand name in the URL. More details about the experiment results, survey design process and rationale can be found in the associated paper: Sara Albakry, Kami Vaniea, and Maria Wolters. What is this URL’s Destination: Empirical Evaluation of Web Users’ URL Reading. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in computing systems. ACM, 2020.Albakry, Sara; Vaniea, Kami; Wolters, Maria. (2020). Opinions on Weblinks, [text]. University of Edinburgh