6533b7dbfe1ef96bd1270979

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Filtering usability data with reference to behavior

Ludger Martin

subject

Usability labUsability goalsEngineeringCognitive walkthroughPluralistic walkthroughbusiness.industryHuman–computer interactionUsability engineeringUsability inspectionComputerApplications_COMPUTERSINOTHERSYSTEMSUsabilitybusinessWeb usability

description

No company can stay in business without having a "useful" web presence. The question is how usefullnes can be achieved. Usefullnes in this sense is how attractive and useful it is for the visitors. This can be done by observing the visitors' behavior. Doing this through interviews and observation of users in their living rooms is expensive and in many cases even impractical. So, other means need to be found. This paper presents a tool for the evaluation of usefulness of a web presence by extracting and analyzing information out of its log files. The information extraction can be refined using a set of filters which can be arbitrarily combined by the usability engineer responsible for maintaining attractiveness of the web site. The visualization tool is provided to aid the usability engineer in understanding the large amounts of data collected. It can be demonstrated that even the cultural background of the visitors of a web site can be extracted.

https://doi.org/10.1145/2064448.2064471