A combination measurement for studying disorientation

The disorientation problem has been known to exist on hypertext and hypermedia systems. Various approaches have also been recommended and implemented in order to eliminate or reduce it.. There is, however, a lack of empirical evidence to suggest whether any of these approaches are successful. One reason seems to be the difficulty of measuring disorientation. One of the traditional methods used in the study of disorientation is to measure the time taken by users to complete a particular task. Another method uses feedback from users collected by a set of questions designed to identify occurences of disorientation experienced by users. This paper highlights the problems and ambiguities that could arise from using these methods. Guidelines and standards on how to measure disorientation are also almost non-existent. Therefore, this paper also proposes a combination of measurements that can be used for such purposes. This measurement was used in two experiments conducted to study disorientation problems on the WWW. The correlation analysis performed on the results of these experiments supports the idea that there are relationships between the time taken and the disorientation experienced by the users, and that these relationships depend on the type of task.