Contextualizing the Blogosphere: A Comparison of Traditional and Novel User Interfaces for the Web

In this paper, we investigate how contextual user interfaces affect blog reading experience. Based on a review of previous research, we argue why and how contextualization may result in (H1) enhanced blog reading experiences . In an eyetracking experiment, we tested 3 different web-based user interfaces for information spaces. The StarTree interface (by Inxight) and the Focus-Metaphor interface are compared with a standard blog interface. Information tasks have been used to evaluate and compare task performance and user satisfaction between these three interfaces. We found that both contextual user interfaces clearly outperformed the traditional blog interface, both in terms of task performance as well as user satisfaction.