Empirical Tests of the Human-Web Interaction Cycle

Farris (2003) proposed the Human-Web Interaction (HuWI) cycle, which predicts that 1) system knowledge (i.e., one's knowledge base) will direct interaction with a website, 2) system knowledge will be modified by the user's interaction with the website, and 3) only goal-relevant information should be attended to during these interactions. This paper describes two experiments that tested these three predictions. In Experiment 1, performance was worse when participants' system knowledge was inconsistent with a website, which suggests that system knowledge was directing interaction with the website. In addition, participants tested for knowledge of the content before and after interacting with the website demonstrated higher posttest scores than pretest scores, which indicates that system knowledge was modified by interacting with the website. In Experiment 2, participants attended primarily to goal-relevant information, if the goal pertained to content. These findings generally support the validity of the HuWI cycle.