Main Results

This page describes the purpose and contents of the reports in this section. Select a menu item from the left menu bar in order to view the actual reports.

This section contains the main findings, arranged in the following html pages:

  • A page about this report, why and how this report was generated
  • Scores - about the site and about three main aspects of the user experience
  • A list of worst pages, in terms of the aspects of user experience - with indications of possible reasons for the user difficulties
  • Summary of the user difficulties, arranged by the three main aspects of the user experience
  • Action items - about the main user problems, followed by general recommendations for improving the user experience.  

The Aspects of User Experience

The scores and the findings correspond to three main aspects of the user experience:

  • the quality of internal references (links) to a page determines the ease of access, as well as unintentional access to this page,
  • the system response time (performance) from the moment of the user request to the complete information download
  • the quality of information displayed to the users determines the information readability, as well as information that irritates the users .

The Scores

The scores are based several indicators of the user experience of navigation difficulties, such as:

  • The rate of site exits 
  • Backward navigation
  • Exceptionally high, consistent response delay.

The action items

The action items are derived in two steps:

  1. Automatic analysis of the log file(s) enables focus on those pages that prevent seamless navigation
  2. Manual validation, by thorough, professional examination of the most problematic site pages.

 The information obtained by automatic analysis is complementary to the information obtain by user problem reports. While the user problem reports are based on the problems of which the users are aware, the automatic analysis reveals problems of which the users are not aware at all. In fact, users are typically so busy in problem solving that they are not aware of the most frequent and most severe aspects of the negative navigation experience.

 A typical example is when the text describing a link to a different page is not well written, which implies that users are likely to interpret it incorrectly. When activating such links, the users are faced with an unexpected page. The mental efforts required for the user to understand the unexpected page while tracing their original task are exhaustive, and most users typically do not remember at this stage the text that describes the link that they were using to get to the unexpected page. What they typically report is about well known problems, such as long download time, small fonts, improper colors etc.