The Need For Innovation in Assessing Web Content Performance: A Case Study

Best practices provide convenient, but general, guidelines for authoring web content; however, as general guidelines, they cannot possibly provide the best advice for every context. Testing is required to know if their application works in a specific context. However, testing web content is challenging, especially content that does not support the funnel-shaped interactions typically found in commerce-oriented web sites. This paper presents the case of an experiment that tested how varying two common best practices for web content-content minimalism and visual navigational affordances-affected software developers' perceptions and task performance. Applying these best practices improved some metrics as expected, but also reduced or had no measurable effect on others. The experience from this case study revealed opportunities for innovation in web-content authoring: (1) describing best practices to include the contexts in which they are most effective and the factors they might improve, (2) developing methods for modeling audience requirements and goals as they relate to the effective use of information concepts and visual design, and (3) improving the tools and methods used to measure web content and integrate such measurements into the authoring process.