Multimodal Usage Visualization for Large Websites

Large websites pose the following challenges for comprehension of user behavior: users’ behaviors are complex and diverse, the web log data is very noisy, and the quantity of the web log data is of a magnitude that defies direct analysis. In this paper we present an integrated multimodal approach for usability analysis of large websites. Our research combines web content mining and web usage mining techniques in a novel integrated system which visualizes usage patterns and user goals. Furthermore, it compares web usage with website structure of content, giving a measure of design quality. Bringing usage mining and content mining together allows web designers to discover root-cause problems in the web design. The system displays multimodal information in a reflective interface. This interface provides a direct interactive visualization and query environment to discover web usage patterns. For any given usage pattern, our system uncovers the related information goal, using webpage semantic analysis and information foraging techniques. We evaluate our technique and demonstrate our system’s value to improve web design and understand web usage.