Adaptive Web Sites: User Studies and Simulation

• Doug Warner, RightNow Technologies, USA
• Stephen D. Durbin, RightNow Technologies, USA
• J. Neal Richter, RightNow Technologies, USA
• Zuzana Gedeon, RightNow Technologies, USA

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Track: Posters

Adaptive web sites have been proposed to enhance ease of navigation and information retrieval. A variety of approaches are described in the literature, but consideration of interface presentation issues and realistic user studies are generally lacking. We report here a large-scale study of sites with dynamic information collections and user interests, where adaptation is based on an Ant Colony Optimization technique. We find that most users were able to locate information effectively without needing to perform explicit searches. The behavior of users who did search was similar to that on Internet search engines. Simulations based on site and user models give insight into the adaptive behavior and correspond to observations.