HCI Browser: A Tool for Administration and Data Collection for Studies of Web Search Behaviors

摘要

We describe the HCI Browser, a Mozilla Firefox extension designed to support studies of Web information seeking. The HCI Browser presents configurable tasks to the user, collects browser event data as the user interacts with the browser and Web pages, provides mechanisms to record answers that are found, and administers pre- and post-task questionnaires. In this paper, aspects of using and configuring the HCI Browser are summarized and details are given about the events logged, the format of the log files, and how the system is implemented as a Firefox extension. The HCI Browser is open-source software and is available for download at: http://ils.unc.edu/hcibrowser.