Using Web Analytics to Investigate the Navigational Behavior of Users

Abstract

Today, web analytics and big data provide the basis for the evaluations of websites. However, the interpretation of this data in terms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) can be challenging and there has been little progress in the systematic exploration of the potentials of web analytics within the usability evaluation domain. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to analyzing large amounts of usage data with the goal to detect usability problems in the use of a website. The underlying idea was that the analysis of patterns can support the HCI analysis of a website. To this end, we developed an extension for the open source web analytics package Piwik that allows investigating the navigational behavior of users through the abstraction of individual interaction paths. The developed system supports data mining on navigation logs and the discovery of interesting patterns.