Template for Website browsing

Abstract

Websites on e-commerce often display large amounts of multi-media and information, creating problems for viewers when locating specific information. This research uses the concepts of template and selective attention to understand the cognitive simplification in finding information and browsing websites. Utilizing content analysis with 240 university students as subjects, we conducted an experiment on information retention with browsing a shopping website. Although the amount of information displayed by the website was staggering, the result of the experiment showed that participants applied a template built up through past experiences of what’s important and where things belong. This internal map containing three mechanisms: segmentation, grouping and attention, is then used to create an efficient task strategy, to segment the page, and to categorize the information. This research tried to understand the attributes of template for users who are browsing Websites. The “findability” of online information would be improved if the arrangement of information of a web site were the same as what viewers expected.