| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 傳播所 === 91 === The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of various factors on user performance and attitude for a handheld small screen display. The factors studied were the arrangement of web link hierarchies, cultural communication differences, and time orientation. User performance is measured by the total number of linking steps, the total amount of time and number of errors taken till task completion. User attitude is defined as mental workload, disorientation, satisfaction, and preference.
An experiment was conducted with 89 Taiwanese participants. Participants were asked to search the hypertext for answers to ten questions using different information architectures in a handheld device. Most of the participants were University of National Chiao Tung students. This study was a 2x2x2 factorial with three variables: breadth/depth menu structure, high/low context communication, polychronic/monochronic time orientation.
The result showed that the number of linking steps and task completion time increased as the depth of the web site increases. The result also indicated that high-context communication people tend to have a lower satisfaction level, and be more disorientated, especially in terms of subject and memory disorientation, than the low-context communication people. Also, polychronic people had a lighter mental workload than monochronic people.
These results suggest that menu breadth is more appropriate for new handheld devices. We also give some suggestions for interfaces aimed at the groups with lower performances. High-context people should be given clearer information clues in order to reduce disorientation, and they prefer menu breadth over depth. As for monochronic people, a simple interface should be used to reduce their mental workload, and monochronic people prefer menu depth.
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