Fundamentals of User Perception and Interaction: Environmental Psychology applied in a study of web pages

This paper explores the possibility of using theories and concepts from the field of environmental psychology as a framework for understanding perception ofand interaction with web pages. A qualitative pilot experiment has been conducted in order to investigate potential similarities in how people interact with, and perceive web pages and real world environments. This study indicates that perception of web pages is very similar to perception of natural environments. Many key factors that have proven to be important in perception of natural environments, such as complexity, spatial configuration and mystery, also appear to be relevant determinants in perception of web pages. Further, it also seems likely that interaction with web pages, to some extent can be described using a model based upon a conceptual framework depicting habitats selection.