Multi-level evaluation of web site navigability

Much research in recent years has focused on the evaluation of web site quality. The majority of this research has focused on evaluating the quality of individual pages or that of a site as a whole. In this paper, we propose an evaluation approach that combines evaluations at the page level with the one of the web site by means of a page-importance weighing model. We illustrate our approach with the particular characteristic of navigability. Both navigability models at the page and site levels are implemented as Bayesian Belief Networks to manage explicitly the uncertainty of web site evaluation. The page importance weighting is implemented using a random walk strategy. We evaluated the resulting model using a mean-different hypothesis testing. The results showed that our model allows discriminating correctly between web sites having a good navigability and randomly-selected web sites.