Emerging Trends in the WWW User Population.

With goals of understanding the World Wide Web (WWW) user population and promoting the Web as a viable surveying medium, the WWW User Surveys were initially conducted by Georgia Institute of Technology's Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center during January 1994. Subsequent surveys have been administered approximately 6 months thereafter. Essentially, respondents are led through a series of question-answer-adapt⁄reask cycles. Upon selection of a questionnaire the surveying software generates the default set of questions from the question database. One of the most stable characteristics of previous surveys has been that one of five users stated outright that they would not pay for access to WWW sites. For the fourth survey, this segment of the population increased from 22.6% in the third survey to 31.8%. The majority of users who participated in the fourth survey reported using their browsers daily. Users in Europe spent slightly less time using their browsers than users in the U.S., which is the reverse of the third survey.