Lessons From Reading E-News for Browsing the Web: The Roles of Genre and Task

An appreciation of the roles of genre and task is important in understanding how people browse the Web. Genre is characterized by content and form and is intimately linked to the task at hand. In moving from ink-on-paper to E-News, The Electronic News Delivery Project examined both user interfaces and personalized filtering for electronic newspapers. Time-and-again, research results from user studies supported the importance of both genre and task in interface design and the effectiveness of personalized filtering of electronic news. The results also indicated that, given the same task, the link between the genre and task was essentially the same for both ink-on-paper and electronic news. In this paper, we present the results of a recent study on the effectiveness of predicting interesting Web pages based on the content of previously visited pages. Preliminary results suggest that there is a great similarity between reading electronic news and browsing the Web with regards to the roles of genre and task. The results suggest that there are lessons to be learned in the design of Web sites and filtering mechanism from the previous research on electronic news.