Studying information interaction in context: some lessons for traffic experiments

Abstract

One way of studying information interaction in context is to conduct traffic experiments. We recently compared different versions of a small website with low traffic volumes to demonstrate some hypothesised effects on information interaction. In this paper, we describe the methodological lessons we learnt when conducting these experiments. The lessons concern: i) implementing versions of the site in a way that supports parallel testing; and ii) designing the web site to operationalise information quality variables (persuasiveness, credibility etc).