Timelines for Mobile Web Usability Evaluation

Abstract

In the field of Web usability evaluation, one potential effective approach is the usage of logging tools for remote usability analysis (i.e. tools capable of tracking and recording the users' activities while they interact with a Web site), and then presenting the recorded data to usability experts in such a way to support detection of possible usability problems. In the design of such automated tools, in addition to the problems related to user behavior recording, another important issue is the choice of meaningful visual representations in order to support the usability expert analysis. In this paper we present a timeline-based system for interactive events visualization, which has been exploited in a proxy-based mobile Web usability evaluation tool. We discuss how such visualizations can be exploited in finding usability issues and the type of problems that can be detected through them. We show various ways to compare timelines related to users sessions with ideal timelines representing optimal behavior.