Grammatical Analysis of User Interface Events for Task Identification

Modern window-based applications are event-driven. User interface events carry valuable information about user behavior and are considered as an important source of data for usability evaluation. Aspect-oriented techniques provide an effective way to capture user interface events. However, it is insufficient to analyze event traces based on the information carried within events themselves. We describe a grammatical approach to analyzing event traces and identifying user tasks in the context of a task model. We also describe a proof-of-concept experiment to demonstrate its feasibility. Our approach paves the way for automatic support for task identification and therefore is beneficial to user interface evaluation that relies on task-based usability data