Users' representation of spatial information on websites

A large number of studies focus on the development and evaluation of navigational aids in a digital environment. Although results are far from unequivocal, there is fair evidence for the beneficial effect of global structural aids, such as site maps. Less clear is how exactly these navigation aids help digital users: do they promote a semantic or task oriented representation of the information space, do they help users to keep track of their ongoing task or do they simply help users to locate information in virtual space? If we want to answer these questions, more knowledge is needed about how each of these representational levels contributes to the success of digital information tasks. As a first step of this research agenda, we investigated the proportion and the nature of each of these levels in thinking/working aloud protocols of users executing or monitoring digital information tasks. The protocols were collected by using different elicitation methods, which enables us to compare these methods in their ability to disclose the interaction between spatial, semantic and pragmatic representation levels in executing digital tasks.