The design and improvement of existing web browser navigation tools is often motivated by reports of high tool usage in the literature. However, general usage data alone is not enough to understand the utility of a given navigation tool. In this paper, we explore how factors such as task and individual differences influence the usage of different web browser navigation tools. We conducted a field study of 21 participants in which we logged detailed web usage and asked participants to provide task categorizations of their web usage based on the following tasks: Fact Finding, Information Gathering, Browsing, and Transactions. Using this data, we have identified three factors that play a role in the use of navigation tools: the task session, the task, and individual differences. These findings have implications for the future design of new and improved web navigation tools.

It is often desirous to obtain a full picture of users ’ web behaviours and activities across a variety of browsing environments. This is challenging due to the wide variety of “normal ” environments possible; differences in location, device, web browser, and settings fluctuate both across participants and for each participant. Web data collection tools are required that are able to capture a broad range of data elements and work within multiple environments. This paper reflects on the data collection process undertaken as we investigated how people perceive the privacy of visited pages if others are able to later see traces of that activity. We wanted to capture the majority of participants ’ web browsing and we did not want our logging of this information to affect their normal browsing environment or patterns. Our data collection choice, a browser helper object, resulted in a minimal impact on the participants ’ web environment, but limited the types of contextual data we could collect and restricted the population we could study. This paper also includes a discussion of ongoing data analysis challenges and a visualization tool, VOLTS.

Permission is herewith granted to Dalhousie University to circulate and to have copied for non-commercial purposes, at its discretion, the above title upon the request of individuals or institutions.