Concepts inThe scent of a site: a system for analyzing and predicting information scent, usage, and usability of a Web site
Information foraging
Information foraging is a theory that applies the ideas from optimal foraging theory to understand how human users search for information. The theory is based on the assumption that, when searching for information, humans use "built-in" foraging mechanisms that evolved to help our animal ancestors find food. Importantly, better understanding of human search behaviour can improve the usability of websites or any other user interface.
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Usability
Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a usability analyst or as a secondary job function by designers, technical writers, marketing personnel, and others.
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World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3, commonly known as the Web, or the "Information Superhighway"), is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia, and navigate between them via hyperlinks.
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Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a set of related web pages containing content such as text, images, video, audio, etc. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet address known as a Uniform Resource Locator. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web.
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Web usability
Web usability is the application of usability in those domains where web browsing can be considered as a general paradigm (or "metaphor") for constructing a GUI.
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Information visualization
Information visualization is the interdisciplinary study of "the visual representation of large-scale collections of non-numerical information, such as files and lines of code in software systems, library and bibliographic databases, networks of relations on the internet, and so forth".
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Predictive modelling
Predictive modelling is the process by which a model is created or chosen to try to best predict the probability of an outcome. In many cases the model is chosen on the basis of detection theory to try to guess the probability of an outcome given a set amount of input data, for example given an email determining how likely that it is spam. Models can use one or more classifiers in trying to determine the probability of a set of data belonging to another set, say spam or 'ham'.
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Hypothesis
A hypothesis (from Greek ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿; plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿ hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose". For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous observations that cannot satisfactorily be explained with the available scientific theories.
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