Abstract
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 logging. Captured usage traces can be aggregated and visualized in a zooming interface that shows the web pages people viewed. The visualization also shows the most common paths taken through the web site for a given task, as well as the optimal path for that task, as designated by the designer. This paper discusses the architecture of WebQuilt and describes how it can be extended for new kinds of analyses and visualizations.
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Index Terms
- WebQuilt: A proxy-based approach to remote web usability testing
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Reviews
James H. Bradford
Web browsing has become a significant activity throughout the developed world. It is an activity that underpins modern e-commerce, as well as facilitating access to the vast store of communal knowledge held in the World Wide Web. Research into the human factors of browsing behavior is important because Web browsing itself is important. This paper introduces an interesting new tool for the usability testing of Web pages. The authors point out that traditional transaction logging for user Web browsing behavior is either server-based or client-based. Both approaches have their drawbacks. The authors introduce a variation of the server-side technique that uses a proxy server to get around some of the traditional problems with server-side logging. This tool, called WebQuilt, represents a novel—and potentially very useful—approach to data collection. Much of the rest of the paper describes the implementation of the WebQuilt tool, in sufficient detail to guide other researchers in the development of their own proxy server monitoring tools. The paper concludes with a detailed discussion of action inferencing and visualization techniques that will be valuable to researchers in this area, no matter what data collection procedure is used. In summary, this is a good piece of applied research, which sets the groundwork for further experiments in an important area of human factors study. Online Computing Reviews Service
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