An Analysis of User Behavior on the Web: Understanding the Web and Its Users - Softcover

Revision with unchanged content. At first sight, browsing the World Wide Web is a fairly intuitive and simple activity, but it turns out that users often experience difficulties in finding the information and services that they are looking for - or in returning to items that they have visited before. In order to improve the current design of Web sites and Web browsers, or to provide users with personalized interfaces, one needs to know how users interact with the Web. Although theoretical models and empirical data exist, the knowledge that they provide is limited and scattered. In this book, we integrate current insights and extend this body of knowledge with a number of user studies. Several methods are presented for obtaining, clearing, analyzing and visualizing Web usage data. Various aspects of user navigation styles are discussed. Particular attention is given to the issue why, when and how often users return to Web pages, and how browsers can support this more effectively. An important observation is that the Web has evolved from a hypermedia system to a hybrid between hypermedia and interactive applications. This book targets researchers and professionals who want to better understand and support the users that visit their Web sites or that make use of their applications and tools.

Received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. A long-term Web usage study, in collaboration with the University of Hamburg, was awarded at the WWW2006 conference. He works at the L3S Research Center in Hannover, Germany. Main research: user modeling, Web personalization, usability and interaction design.