Problem of website structure discovery and quality valuation

Navigation as a part of an interface was always an important issue of a design process. Because information architecture and the navigation of current websites are very complex, especially of e-commerce websites or information portals, it is very hard to analyze or redesign a structure in a manual way. In order to solve the problem of automation of website structure analysis, there should be defined its model. Also, during the study of a subject it was found, that there is a lack of a quality estimator, which allows to valuate in a vary moments the quality of the structure. Observation of a structure quality gives possibility to analyze and decide when the structure should be changed basing on decision rules or calculated thresholds for analyzed amount of time. The main aim of this study is to describe a model for website structure representation, derive the quality estimator, define and solve the problem of website structure discovery and quality valuation utilizing the proposed metric. Finally, experiment with utilization of proposed methods is presented.