Participants
The participants were 51 experienced Web users recruited by Sun (average number of Web experience was a couple of years). Participants ranged in age from 22-69 (average age was 41). In an attempt to give attention to “normal users,” we excluded the professions that are following the research: webmasters, web site designers, graphic designers, graphical user interface professionals, writers, editors, computer scientists, and computer programmers.
We checked for ramifications of age and Web experience in the dependent variables mentioned in the 1st five hypotheses, but we found only differences-none significant that is negligible. Had the websites within our study been more challenging to navigate or had our tasks necessitated use of search engines or any other Web infrastructure, we might have expected significant ramifications of both age and Web experience.
The experiment employed a 5-condition (promotional control, scannable, concise, objective, or combined) between-subjects design. Conditions were balanced for employment and gender status.
Experimental Materials
Called “Travel Nebraska,” the website contained information regarding Nebraska. We used a travel site because 1) in our earlier qualitative studies, many Web users said travel is one of their interests, and 2) travel content lent itself towards the writing that is different we wanted to study. We chose Nebraska to attenuate the end result of prior knowledge on our measures (in recruiting participants, we screened out people who had ever lived in, and even near, Nebraska).
Each form of the Travel Nebraska site consisted of seven pages, and all versions used the same hypertext structure. To ensure that participants would focus on text rather than be distracted, we used modest hypertext (with no links away from site) and included only three photos and something illustration. There was no animation. Topics within the site were Nebraska’s history, geography, population, tourist attractions, and economy. The Appendix for this paper shows areas of an example page from each condition. (more…)