Facilitating navigation in information spaces: Road-signs on the World Wide Web

A series of experiments was conducted to evaluate whether simple hyperlink annotations-traffic lights that represent Internet connection speeds-can facilitate web navigation. Traffic lights are small red, yellow or green images added around the anchor text of each link indicating its connection speed, red for slow, yellow for somewhat fast and green for fastest. The first two experiments showed that traffic lights do not facilitate perceptual processes involved in web navigation (i.e. link localization and visual search). However, traffic lights also do not distract from the process of finding links in hypertext documents and, thus have no perceptual performance cost. The third experiment showed that traffic lights facilitate web navigation performance by improving link evaluation and decision processes. This improvement is particularly marked when link relevance is low or undifferentiated. It was concluded that supplying users with information about Internet connection speeds improves web navigation performance. Thus, traffic lights provide functional cues for efficiently navigating the web. © 1999 Academic Press