ABSTRACT
This paper describes the visual analysis tool WebQuilt, a web usability logging and visualization system that helps web design teams record and analyze usability tests. The logging portion of WebQuilt unobtrusively gathers clickstream data as users complete specified tasks. This data is then aggregated and presented as an interactive graph, where nodes of the graph are images of the web pages visited, and arrows are the transitions between pages. To aid analysis of the gathered usability test data, the WebQuilt visualization provides filtering capabilities and semantic zooming, allowing the designer to understand the test results at the gestalt view of the entire graph, and then drill down to sub-paths and single pages. The visualization highlights important usability issues, such as pages where users spent a lot of time, pages where users get off track during the task, navigation patterns, and exit pages, all within the context of a specific task. WebQuilt is designed to conduct remote usability testing on a variety of Internet-enabled devices and provide a way to identify potential usability problems when the tester cannot be present to observe and record user actions.
- Brainard, J. and B. Becker. Case Study: E-Commerce Clickstream Visualization. In Proceedings of IEEE Proceedings of Information Visualization. San Diego, CA. pp. 151--155, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Carrière, J. and R. Kazman. WebQuery: Searching and Visualizing the Web through Connectivity. In Proceedings of Sixth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW6). Santa Clara, CA, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chi, E. H., P. Pirolli, and J. Pitkow. The Scent of a Site: A System for Analyzing and Predicting Information Scent, Usage, and Usability of a Web Site. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2000 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cugini, J. and J. Scholtz. VISVIP: 3D Visualization of Paths through Web Sites. In Proceedings of International Workshop on Web-Based Information Visualization (WebVis '99). Florence, Italy: IEEE Computer Society, 1999.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Davison, B. Web Traffic Logs: An Imperfect Resource for Evaluation. In Proceedings of Ninth Annual Conference of the Internet Society (INET '99). San Jose, CA, 1999.Google Scholar
- Edmonds, A. Lucidity Project. 2001. http://sourceforge.net/projects/lucidity/.Google Scholar
- Eick, S. G. Visualizing Online Activity. Communications of the ACM, 2001. 44(8): pp. 45--50. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Etgan, M. and J. Cantor. What Does Getting WET (Web Event-Logging Tool) Mean for Web Usability? In Proceedings of Fifth Human Factors and the Web Conference. Gaithersburg, MD, 1999.Google Scholar
- Guzdial, M., P. Santos, A. Badre, S. Hudson, and M. Gray. Analyzing and Visualizing Log Files: A Computation Science of Usability. Technical Report, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1994.Google Scholar
- Hochheiser, H. and B. Shneiderman. Understanding Patters of User visits to Web Sites: Interactive Starfield Visualizations of WWW Log Data. Technical Report, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 1999.Google Scholar
- Hong, J. I., J. Heer, S. Waterson, and J. A. Landay. WebQuilt: A Proxy-based Approach to Remote Web Usability Testing. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 19(3). 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hong, J. I. and J. A. Landay. SATIN: A Toolkit for Informal Ink-based Applications. In Proceedings of ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 63--72, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Huang, M. Information Visualization in Web Site Mapping: A Survey. In Proceedings of World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics. Orlandlo, FL, July 23--26, 2000.Google Scholar
- InfoZoom. JacoZoom. 2001. http://www.infozoom.de/ie/jacozoom.html.Google Scholar
- Lamm, S. E. and D. A. Reed. Real-Time Geographic Visualization of World Wide Web Traffic. In Proceedings of Fifth International World Wide Web Confernce (WWW5). Paris, France, 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- NetRaker. NetRaker Suite. 2001. http://netraker.com.Google Scholar
- Nielsen, J. Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce? 2001. http://useit.com/alertbox/20010819.html.Google Scholar
- Paganelli, L. and F. Paternó. Intelligent Analysis of user Interactions with Web Applications. In Proceedings of IUI: Intelligent User Interfaces. San Francisco, CA, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Spool, J., T. Scanlon, W. Schroeder, C. Snyder, and T. DeAngelo. Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tedeschi, B. Good Web Site Design Can Lead to Healthy Sales. 1999. http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/cyber/commerce/30commerce.html.Google Scholar
- Visuallnsights. eBizinsights. 2001. http://www.visualinsights.com.Google Scholar
- Vividence. Vividence ClickStreams. 2000. http://www.vividence.com/resources/public/solutions/demo/demo-print.htm.Google Scholar
- Waterson, S., T. Matthews, and J. A. Landay. In the Lab and Out in the Wild: Remote Web Usability Testing for Mobile Devices. To appear in Proceedings of ACM CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Minneapolis, MN, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wexelblat, A. and P. Maes. Footprints: History-Rich Tools for Information Foraging. In Proceedings of Proceedings of ACM CHI 1999 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Pittsburgh, PA, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zona Research. Shop Until You Drop? A Glimpse into Internet Shopping Success. 1999. http://www.zonaresearch.com/promotios/samples/zaps/Zap06.htm.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- What did they do? understanding clickstreams with the WebQuilt visualization system
Recommendations
WebQuilt: A proxy-based approach to remote web usability testing
WebQuilt is a web logging and visualization system that helps web design teams run usability tests (both local and remote) and analyze the collected data. Logging is done through a proxy, overcoming many of the problems with server-side and client-side ...
A method for remote and semi-automatic usability evaluation of web-based applications through users behavior analysis
MB '10: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral ResearchIn this paper we describe a method for evaluating the usability of web-based applications. Our method is based on remote and automatic capture and semi-automatic analysis of users behavior, in order to find usability problems in the applications' ...
WebQuilt: a framework for capturing and visualizing the web experience
WWW '01: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World Wide Web
Comments