Finding governmental statistical data on the Web: A study of categorically organized links for the FedStats topics page

More than 100 U.S. governmental agencies offer links through FedStats, a centralized Web site that facilitates access to statistical tables, reports, and agencies. This and similar large collections need appropriate interfaces to guide the general public to easily and successfully find information they seek. This paper summarizes the results of 3 empirical studies of alternate organization concepts of the FedStats Topics Web page. Each study had 15 participants. The evolution from 645 alphabetically organized links, to 549 categorically organized links, to 215 categorically organized links tied to portal pages produced a steady rise in successful task completion from 15.6 to 24.4 to 42.2%. User satisfaction also increased. We make recommendations based on these data and our observations of users.