Using Interaction Data to Explain Difficulty Navigating Online

A user's behaviour when browsing a Web site contains clues to that user's experience. It is possible to record some of these behaviours automatically, and extract signals that indicate a user is having trouble finding information. This allows for Web site analytics based on user experiences, not just page impressions. A series of experiments identified user browsing behaviours—such as time taken and amount of scrolling up a page—which predict navigation difficulty and which can be recorded with minimal or no changes to existing sites or browsers. In turn, patterns of page views correlate with these signals and these patterns can help Web authors understand where and why their sites are hard to navigate. A new software tool, “LATTE,” automates this analysis and makes it available to Web authors in the context of the site itself.

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