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Do Common User Interface Design Patterns Improve Navigation?

The Internet has become a growing channel for consumer purchases. Half of all U.S. consumers made at least one purchase on-line in 2001. However, many consumers report frustration with the lack of support for navigation within many Internet retailers' web sites. Several design patterns have been suggested to overcome these limitations, such as expanded hierarchies and breadcrumbs. This study investigated the effects of these design patterns on users' quantitative performance and subjective preference for ecommerce web sites. Expanded hierarchies, a design pattern that is commonly used by many retail web sites, degraded all of the performance metrics assessed in the study. Users required more time, made more errors, used more clicks, and had lower satisfaction scores for sites designed with expanded hierarchies. The results for breadcrumbs suggest that they may improve performance. The inclusion of breadcrumbs reduced the number of clicks required by users to complete the tasks, but other performance metrics did not reach statistical significance. The results indicate that design patterns that are believed to improve performance a priori may not yield the results expected.