General interface to the experiment.
When participants visited the network in order to participate in our experiment, they first received a short page outlining the general principles of our experiment, how the interface functioned and what we expected from our experimental subjects.
From there on, a link was offered to the actual Adaptive Web network.
The adaptive pages consisted of:
- a header indicating the browser's position in the network, e.g. 'cat'
- followed by a vertically ordered, bulleted list of 10 node names that could be reached from that position (e.g. 'dog', 'pet', etc.)
According to the previously mentioned presentation principle, this list was ordered according to descending connection strength: strongest connections appeared on top, weakest connection on the bottom of the list.
- This list of 10 nodes was followed by a 'more links...'-link that led to the following 10 nodes in the ordered list. Browsers could choose up to 14 of these slices, until the 149th connection (position node itself not included) was reached. Selecting "More links" again, then moved the ordering back to the top of the list.
Once a certain connection from the list was selected (e.g. 'dog'), the browser was then refered to that next node. The header again being the selected noun, followed by an ordered list of connections from the selected node, and so on.