Usability Tool Support for Model-Based Web Development

When web engineering methods are used for the development of web applications, models are created during the development process which describe the website. Using the information present in these models, it is possible to create usability tool support that is more advanced than current approaches, which do not rely on the presence of models. This dissertation presents ideas for tool support during different phases of the development, such as the implementation phase or the testing phase. For example, if a tool knows from a model that the audience of a website are teenagers, it can examine whether the words and sentences used on the website are likely to be understood by teenagers. An approach is presented to augment existing web engineering models with the additional information ("age" in this case) and to make it available to tools, e.g. via embedding it in HTML code. Two prototypes demonstrate the concepts for integrating usability tool support into web engineering

Can filesharers be triggered by economic incentives? Results of an experiment

Illegal filesharing on the internet leads to considerable financial losses for artists and copyright owners as well as producers and sellers of music. Thus far, measures to contain this phenomenon have been rather restrictive. However, there are still a considerable number of illegal systems, and users are able to decide quite freely between legal and illegal downloads because the latter are still difficult to sanction. Recent economic approaches account for the improved bargaining position of users. They are based on the idea of revenue-splitting between professional sellers and peers. In order to test such an innovative business model, the study reported in this article carried out an experiment with 100 undergraduate students, forming five small peer-to-peer networks.The networks were confronted with different economic conditions.The results indicate that even experienced filesharers hold favourable attitudes towards revenue-splitting.They seem to be willing to adjust their behaviour to different economic conditions

Tracking the interaction of users with ajax applications for usability testing

In this paper, we introduce an implementation for detailed monitoring of user actions on web pages. It addresses the problem that the log data recorded by standard web servers is not sufficient for the tracking of users on AJAX websites, e.g. to conduct a usability test. Using standard web technologies, our HTTP proxy can record very detailed usage information, such as mouse movements, clicks, key presses and scrolling, together with the exact HTML DOM tree objects involved. As we show in several case studies, the tracking also works across multiple websites, none of which needs to be under our control. This approach is much less invasive than previous efforts: The test person does not need to install software on her computer, and in certain operation modes, no configuration changes at all are required on her computer. Our research indicates that if the technology described in this paper is employed, arbitrary visitors of a website are more likely to take part in a usability test offered by that site – this facilitates recruiting test participants over the Internet

User issues

In this paper, we investigate how detailed tracking of user interaction can be monitored using standard web technologies. Our motivation is to enable implicit interaction and to ease usability evaluation of web applications outside the lab. To obtain meaningful statements on how users interact with a web application, the collected information needs to be more detailed and fine-grained than that provided by classical log files. We focus on tasks such as classifying the user with regard to computer usage proficiency or making a detailed assessment of how long it took users to fill in fields of a form. Additionally, it is important in the context of our work that usage tracking should not alter the user’s experience and that it should work with existing server and browser setups. We present an implementation for detailed tracking of user actions on web pages. An HTTP proxy modifies HTML pages by adding JavaScript code before delivering them to the client. This JavaScript tracking code collects data about mouse movements, keyboard input and more. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach in a case study

Logging Usage of AJAX Applications With The "UsaProxy" HTTP Proxy

This paper shows how to use the UsaProxy HTTP proxy to perform logging of user activity for AJAX web applications. UsaProxy is a special-purpose HTTP proxy which modifies HTML pages before forwarding them to the client browser. It adds JavaScript code which collects data about mouse movement, clicks, key presses and other types of interaction without a#ecting the user's browsing experience in any way. Using Gmail as an example for an AJAX application, the paper explains in detail how to prepare for a UsaProxy-based user test and how to interpret the log files generated by the system