Effectiveness of automatic and expert generated narrative and guided instructions for task-oriented web browsing

Abstract

This study investigated how instructions may be created to facilitate web browsing tasks. Two types of instructions were considered. Narrative instructions are text-based while guided instructions use graphic annotations. One way to create both types of instructions is to utilize the specialty of human experts. A method is also provided for automatic generation of both types of instructions based on the learning of user experience in web browsing. An experiment was conducted to test the effect of types of instruction, sources of instruction, and task complexity setting on performance variables in web browsing. The results of the experiment indicated that (1) by using web annotations, guided instructions resulted in better performance and satisfactions than narrative instructions in web browsing, (2) based on learning of web browsing activities, automatically generated guided instructions are comparable to expert-created guided instructions in terms of their effect on the performance of web browsing.