An automatic web site menu structure evaluation

The purpose of this paper is to propose a method for automatically evaluating Web site menu structures. The evaluation system requires content data and a menu structure with link names. This approach consists of three stages. First, the system classifies the content data into appropriate links. Second, the system identifies the usability problems for all content data. Third, the system calculates an index that indicates the averaged predicted mouse clicks for the menu structure. As applications, a link name selection problem and a link structure evaluation problem are discussed. This system was also applied to real data, such as Encarta´s and Wikipedia´s menus. The results confirmed the usefulness of the system.