A Research on Increasing Context Perception in Online Communication

Abstract

Web forum was a fully developed, cheap and popular medium to support online communication. But most of the Web forums still followed the basic table view interface inherited from the antique Bulletin Board System (BBS). The rigid interface limited context perception by users. To avoid troubles of software developing, many Web service providers choose free package (such as the Discuz!) to deploy their Web sites, which furthermore enhanced the homogeneity of page views. Tree View forum was one of the possible rescues. A tree view forum provided richer context information than traditional Table View. But there were only a few Web sites successfully adopted Tree View. To answer the question why Tree View was better in conveying context information but less popular, a Web view generator (WVG) was devised to support Table View and Tree View, as well as other potential Web-page view patterns. Furthermore, research was conducted to test users' perception and understanding of the contents of Web pages in both Tree View and Table View. It was found that Tree View web pages presented the context of discussion better than Table View web pages. The barrier in preventing the popularization of the Tree View related to the inexperience with the Tree View. Tree View was also found to be more reading-time saving than Table View.