Investigating the relationship between task complexity, cognitive ability and disorientation in hypertext navigation

Abstract

Learning Management Systems, Massive Open Online Courses and Wikis are designed in hypertext format, which offers a more participatory and productive environment to create and share information. In these environments, the students navigate on their own to reach objectives (learning) or seek information (searching). However, users are sometimes faced with a common and serious problem called disorientation, which is defined as the feeling of being lost in web-based environment. It is important to determine the reasons for disorientation in order to make the students navigate more efficiently in these environments. For this purpose, an experimental research was designed and a 223-page wiki environment was developed as a network structured hypertext environment. Sixty-nine university students’ navigation processes including 6.880 row log data were recorded in order to measure their disorientation scores. We found that task complexity negatively affected disorientation scores. Possible causes of the results are discussed. Keywords: Disorientation, cognitive ability, hypermedia navigation, task complexity