NavOptim Coding: Supporting Website Navigation Optimisation using Effort Minimisation

Web applications have rapidly become critical to the interaction that organisations have with their external stakeholders. A major factor in the effectiveness of this interaction is the ease with which navigation within the application can occur, and especially the extent to which users can locate information and functionality which they are seeking. Effective design is however complicated by the multiple purposes and users which Web applications typically support. Despite the fact that this implies that navigation design is inherently an optimisation problem, few optimisation techniques have been applied in this domain - with most design techniques being based on intuition, general heuristics, or experimental refinement. In this paper we discuss this problem, and propose a navigation representation which can become the basis for optimisation techniques.