As a website evolves to align with users’ changing information needs and interests, its structure can outgrow the original design, accumulating links and pages in unanticipated places. This increases complexity to both web pages and the navigation structure, which could cause difficulty in locating relevant links and information. Though the increasing complexity of website and its impact on users’ psychological perception have been anecdotally well-recognized, the need to address it with a formal and rigorous method is understudied in the literature. This paper is one of the first studies to examine how to streamline website structures to enhance user navigation. We use a widely used metric in the literature - a page's outdegree (the number of links in a page) - as the measurement for complexity, because it not only serves as a good proximity for page complexity but also has a significant implication on website structure. We propose a method based on mathematical programming (MP) model that can significantly reduce users’ cognitive load by effectively eliminating appropriate links from pages with high complexity. We have performed extensive experiments on both a real dataset and very large synthetic datasets with statistical similarities to the real dataset. The results indicate that our method not only significantly reduces web page and structure complexity with very small impact to user navigation, but also can be effectively solved and scales up remarkably well, suggesting it is useful for website maintenance on a progressive basis. In addition, we conduct a study to evaluate the performance of streamlined website structures using the real dataset and the results confirm the validity of our method.

中文翻译：

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降低网页复杂性以促进有效的用户导航

随着网站的发展与用户不断变化的信息需求和兴趣保持一致，其结构可能会超出原始设计，在意想不到的地方积累链接和页面。这增加了网页和导航结构的复杂性，这可能会导致难以找到相关链接和信息。尽管网站日益复杂及其对用户心理感知的影响已广为人知，但文献中并未充分研究用正式和严格的方法来解决它的必要性。本文是研究如何简化网站结构以增强用户导航的首批研究之一。我们使用文献中广泛使用的指标——页面的出度（页面中的链接数量）——作为复杂性的衡量标准，因为它不仅可以很好地接近页面复杂性，而且对网站结构也有重要影响。我们提出了一种基于数学规划（MP）模型的方法，该方法可以通过从高复杂度的页面中有效地消除适当的链接来显着降低用户的认知负荷。我们对真实数据集和与真实数据集具有统计相似性的非常大的合成数据集进行了大量实验。结果表明，我们的方法不仅显着降低了网页和结构的复杂性，对用户导航的影响很小，而且可以有效地解决并很好地扩展，表明它对于渐进式网站维护很有用。此外，