Exploring client logs towards characterizing the user behavior on Web applications

摘要

Analysis of user interaction with computer systems can be used for several purposes, the most common being analysis of the effectiveness of the interfaces used for interaction (in order to adapt or enhance its usefulness) and analysis of intention and behavior of the users when interacting with these systems. For web applications, often the analysis of user interaction is done using the web server logs collected for every document sent to the user in response to his/her request. In order to capture more detailed data on the users' interaction with sites, one could collect actions the user performs in the client side. An effective approach to this is the USABILICS system, which also allows the definition and analysis of tasks in web applications. The fine granularity of logs collected by USABILICS allows a much more detailed log of users' interaction with a web application. These logs can be converted into graphs where vertices are users' actions and edges are paths made by the user to accomplish a task. Graph analysis and visualization tools and techniques allow the analysis of actions taken in relation to an expected action path, or characterization of common (and uncommon) paths on the interaction with the application. This paper describes how to estimate users' behavior and characterize their intentions during interaction with a web application, presents the analysis and visualization tools on those graphs and shows some practical results with an educational site, commenting on the results and implications of the possibilities of using these techniques.