Clever Tracking User Behaviour over the Web: Enabling Researchers to Respect the User

Evdokiya D Ignatova,Willem-Paul Brinkman

doi:10.14236/ewic/hci2007.34

Evdokiya D Ignatova, Willem-Paul Brinkman

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/hci2007.34

Copy DOI

Publication Date: Sep 1, 2007
Citations: 3	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Brunel University London, Delft University of Technology

Abstract

Concerns over automatically tracking users’ actions while respecting consent, privacy and users’ rights motivated the development of CleverTracker. CleverTracker is a remote action-tracking software framework, which researchers can use to collect data about users’ interactions with applications while respecting ethical issues. Users are in control of the recording process (through start and stop functionality), can opt out from it and can view the collected data. The open source framework is designed to support desktop, web application and multiple programming languages.

Highlights

One way to examine the usability of a system is to test it with real users and analyse collected usage data
Researches may benefit greatly from tracking user actions remotely; this method has a number of recurrent issues, which do not seem to have been fully addressed
Reviews and the further extension of the software, the CleverTracker software framework is distributed as an open source project hosted on SourceForge1, under the BSD license

Summary

INTRODUCTION

One way to examine the usability of a system is to test it with real users and analyse collected usage data. Traditional evaluation methods include questionnaires, interviews and observations This approach may have a limited scope as employing users may be expensive, and the experimental conditions of the setting may cause users’ interactions to be different from what they would be in real life [1]. Today’s advances in broadband Internet services provide ways for applications to record user interaction unobtrusively over long periods of time. This can be done on a larger scale and independent from user locations. It enables researchers to respect users’ rights It aims to achieve this by providing visual controls, which allow users to start, stop and pause data recording, as well as view logged data and opt out from an online research study. Reviews and the further extension of the software, the CleverTracker software framework is distributed as an open source project hosted on SourceForge, under the BSD license

FRAMEWORK DESIGN

Message Flow

Server Component

Client Libraries

VISUAL CONTROLS

USABILITY EVALUATION

LIMITATIONS AND DISCUSION

FINAL REMARKS