tabbing through the active elements

I'm still struggling to understand the tasks that the users who are not
able to see the page are trying to do when they use different kind of
tabbings .

Somebody said at the last teleconf that active elements (links and
controls) are used to get a peak or an overview of what is in the page. I
looked couple of pages shortly trying to simulate that.

One big difficulty was that I really would like to separate between the
navigation bar elements, advertisements and the actual content of the page.
Which one I want to look at a certain time depends at least on what I have
done earlier and what my goals are.

Sometimes I might want to browse first the main title of the page and then
see the navigation bar links to orientate myself. The last part is the
active elements in content. Sometimes I might want to see just the content
links and controls as I am looking different pages at the same site. Often
however, I still browse the headers first and then go to the links and
controls (if I go to a control do I get the explanation of the control as
well?).

It would be nice to learn what the users frequently using these tabbing
techniques do. What kind of strategies they have in going through the pages
and what kind of difficulties there are? Are there clearly different types
of sites that need different strategies? Would it help to use hierarchical
tabbing where you can go up and down to more or less details in the
semantic structure with one button while tabbing forward or backward the
page with another?

  Marja

Received on Thursday, 11 March 1999 15:01:09 UTC