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Knowing the user's every move: user activity tracking for website usability evaluation and implicit interaction

Published: 23 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how detailed tracking of user interaction can be monitored using standard web technologies. Our motivation is to enable implicit interaction and to ease usability evaluation of web applications outside the lab. To obtain meaningful statements on how users interact with a web application, the collected information needs to be more detailed and fine-grained than that provided by classical log files. We focus on tasks such as classifying the user with regard to computer usage proficiency or making a detailed assessment of how long it took users to fill in fields of a form. Additionally, it is important in the context of our work that usage tracking should not alter the user's experience and that it should work with existing server and browser setups. We present an implementation for detailed tracking of user actions on web pages. An HTTP proxy modifies HTML pages by adding JavaScript code before delivering them to the client. This JavaScript tracking code collects data about mouse movements, keyboard input and more. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach in a case study.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '06: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
May 2006
1102 pages
ISBN:1595933239
DOI:10.1145/1135777
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 23 May 2006

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Author Tags

  1. HTTP proxy
  2. implicit interaction
  3. mouse tracking
  4. user activity tracking
  5. website usability evaluation

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  • (2024)Mouse Dynamics Behavioral Biometrics: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/364031156:6(1-33)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2024
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