Using Adaptive Techniques to Validate and Correct an Audience Driven Design of Web Sites

An audience driven philosophy for web site design takes the different target audiences as an explicit starting point, and organizes the basic navigation structure accordingly. However, for the designer it is not always easy, or sometimes even impossible, to assess the different requirements of the different target audiences correctly. In this paper, we show how to correct for such possible flaws using adaptive behavior. A mechanism for detecting both missing and superfluous information in a certain user’s navigation path, by observing user’s browsing behavior, is provided. The designer specifies possible adaptive changes based upon this detection at design time, using a language (Adaptation Specification Language) designed specifically to express changes in the navigation structure of a website.