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This paper presents and discusses a survey of existing tools to support design and evaluation of websites, with special emphasis on improving the information navigation process. The amount of information of today's websites, the continuous evolution of the medium and the heterogeneity of typical users' profiles, make the website design task particularly hard. The presented tools are mainly based on recent models of Web usage behavior, and involve various natural language and semantic similarity modeling methods. Validation studies of the presented tools have shown that they can support effectively various phases of the website design lifecycle including information structuring, hyperlink evaluation and assessment of alternative designs. In this paper, existing techniques are discussed, the aspects of Web design that (should and) could be better supported are identified and suggestions are made on extensions of existing approaches to better support the usability evaluation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following information scent has been established as a metaphor to describe a user's behaviour while navigating an information space by successively selecting hyperlinks. This metaphor suggests that users assess the profitability of following a particular hyperlink based on its perceived semantic association with their goal. The purpose of this paper is to study how information scent, this important attribute of hypermedia navigability, influences concurrently four aspects of users' behaviour while exploring a website: (1) distribution of attention; (2) confidence in choice of link; (3) efficiency; and (4) effectiveness. It was found that in webpages with high scent, users were significantly more focused, confident of their choices, efficient and effective compared to webpages with ambiguous scent. The findings of the study are discussed in comparison with results obtained from a previously conducted analysis using InfoScent Evaluator (ISEtool), a tool that has been proposed to facilitate scent evaluation of websites. This comparison provided support for the effectiveness of ISEtool in indicating potential scent-related navigability problems. We argue that such a tool-based approach can facilitate hypermedia design by reducing the resources and expertise required, and by providing the necessary flexibility for practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]