A study on the role of non-hyperlink text on web navigation

Cognitive models of web navigation have been used for evaluating websites and predicting user navigation behavior. Currently they predict the correct hyperlink by using information from the hyperlink text alone and ignore all other textual information on a webpage. The validity of this assumption is examined by investigating the role of non-hyperlink text on user navigation behavior. In the first experiment, we created two versions of a website by removing the non-hyperlink text from it. We found that there was no significant effect of non-hyperlink text on the user navigation behavior. Participants were equally accurate, selected the same set of pages to visit and spent the same amount of time on that common set with or without non-hyperlink text. This result validates the assumptions of those models of user-navigation behavior that consider information from the hyperlink text only. However, in a followup experiment, we included high-relevance and low-relevance pictures on the website, and repeated the experiment with and without non-hyperlink text. We found that participants were more accurate in the presence of non-hyperlink text than without it. This result suggests that the presence of pictures might prime the users to pay attention to non-hyperlink text, which increases the task accuracy.