Wayfinding in an electronic database: The relative importance of navigational cues vs. mental models

摘要

Difficulties with “wayfinding” are common among users of electronic information systems. A study of strategies (textual, graphic, color) for cuing users to their location in a database showed that the presence or absence of physical cues was less important to successful searching than the user's ability to represent internally the structure of the information. Users with more detailed and complete impressions of the database searched faster. But the variety of different representations of the database suggest it may be very difficult to create generic models as a help to novice users.