Applying AHP to Web Navigation Design

Due to increasing popularity of the World Wide Web, web-based systems are widely used. Most corporate web sites try to enhance their usability by providing artistic web presentations. However, the design of web sites is not judged solely on an artistic basis. Two of the most important design criteria for web sites are access to web content and navigation architecture. This research proposes a platform for automatically evaluating the quality of web navigation architecture. Because of the hierarchical characteristics of web navigation design factors, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method is applied in the evaluation process. This paper describes both the application of the AHP method and the framework of the evaluation platform. Navigation strategies and navigation criteria are defined as the decision factors. Various navigation architectures are natural alternatives of the web architecture design. To provide an evaluation environment for web designs and SQA members, the AHP method is implemented in the evaluation platform to analyze the requirements conformance of web navigation architectures.