A study of interface design for widgets in web services through usability evaluation

The use of web widgets on desktop and mobile devices has been increasing rapidly. Web widgets provide access to activities and information from various sources across the web. As the number of supported widgets increases, managing widgets and finding relevant or interesting widgets becomes more complex. In addition, interacting with widgets in web service systems can be difficult, especially for novice users. Up to this point, there has been little research on web widget usability. This paper performs an experimental study regarding user interfaces of web widgets based on the work-flow analysis and state diagramming techniques. In the experiment, four sites providing widget services are chosen - A, B, C, and D. The experiment participants perform three assigned tasks in the chosen sites, and their mouse operations are recorded using Camtasia, a screencasting software. Mouse tracking analysis is performed based on the recorded data in order to analyze common user behaviors. In addition, workflow diagrams representing the operational flows to carry out the given tasks in each web site are constructed so as to visually and systematically analyze detailed usage patterns. The experimental study results presented in this paper can contribute to developing guidelines for highly usable and accessible interface design of web widgets.