This paper presents results of a long-term client-side Web usage study, updating previous studies that range in age from five to ten years. We focus on three aspects of Web navigation: changes in the distribution of navigation actions, speed of navigation and within-page navigation. “Navigation actions ” corresponding to users ’ individual page requests are discussed by type. We reconfirm links to be the most important navigation element, while backtracking has lost more than half of its previously reported share and form submission has become far more common. Changes of the Web and the browser interfaces are candidates for causing these changes. Analyzing the time users stayed on pages, we confirm Web navigation to be a rapidly interactive activity. A breakdown of page characteristics shows that users often do not take the time to read the available text or consider all links. The performance of the Web is analyzed and reassessed against the resulting requirements. Finally, habits of within-page navigation are presented. Although most selected hyperlinks are located in the top left corner of the screen, in nearly a quarter of all cases people choose links that require scrolling. We analyzed the available browser real estate to gain insights for the design of non-scrolling Web pages.

This paper presents results of an extensive long-term clickstream study of Web browser usage. Focusing on character and challenges of page revisitation, previous findings from seven to thirteen years ago are updated. The term page revisit had to be differentiated, since the recurrence rate—the key measure for the share of page revisits—turns out to strongly depend on interpretation. We identify different types of revisitation that allow assessing the quality of current user support and developing concepts for new tools. Individual navigation strategies differ dramatically and are strongly influenced by personal habits and type of site visited. Based on user action logs and interviews, we distinguished short-term revisits (backtrack or undo) from medium-term (re-utilize or observe) and long-term revisits (rediscover). We analyze current problems and provide suggestions for improving support for different revisitation types.

Keeping a history of the user’s interaction with the environment is of use for many reasons. However, collecting, structuring, accessing, and reviewing such potentially large amounts of information is not trivial. In this paper we present our ideas for a memory model for pervasive computing applications addressing these questions. The proposed architecture allows applications to deliver ad-hoc support taking into account the user’s history and general attitudes as well as providing a personal diary to review events and retrieve memories. We also include a brief discussion of a novel user interface, which allows the user to bind services to general contexts based on his previous experiences.

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.

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In this paper, we present a long-term study of user-centric Web traffic data collected in 2000-2002 and 2005-2006 from two large representative panels of French Internet users. Our work focuses on the dynamics of personal territories on the Web and their evolution between 2000 and 2006. At the session level, we distinguish four profiles of browsing dynamics in 2005-2006, and point out the growing dichotomy between straight routine sessions and exploratory browsing. At a global level, we observe that although each individual’s corpus of visited sites is permanently growing, his browsing practices are structured around routine well-known sites which operate as links providers to new sites. We argue that this tension between the known and the unknown is constitutive of Web practices and is a fundamental property of personal Web territories.