Welcome to our Web navigation history experiment. To begin our study, we would like to introduce you to Netscape 4.0 software. Netscape is a web browser that allows you to visit and view sites on the World Wide Web. Included in Netscape is a new history feature that stores information about your session and the pages that you visited. This experiment will use Netscape plus its history feature to visit previously selected pages within a site. Several tasks will be assigned to you, please complete all of them.

The purpose of this experiment is to assess the usefulness of history as it relates to web navigation. It is important for you to realize that it is not you we are testing. It is the software and the user interface that are under study.

Two windows will appear on the screen. The right-most window will be a Netscape session and the left-most window will be the history record. You will be given questions pertaining to 20 selected web pages, which have been downloaded locally to this machine as HTML files. Answer all the questions on the first list in given order and display each page in the Netscape window. This can be accomplished by selecting and clicking on the appropriate link on the current display page. Continue this sequence until all the questions on the list have been completed. It is important that you respond to all the questions even though you may already know the answer.

Next you will be given another set of questions which will require you to revisit some of the web pages, using Netscape’s history feature. After completing this task, you will be asked to recall some information from your experience. The final task will consist of a questionnaire. Please answer all the questions. Thank you for participating in this experiment.