User Experience

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 diagnostic reports about three aspects of the user experience:

  • The quality of references by links from other pages to this page

  • The user acceptance of the system response time

  • The compatibility of the information displayed on screen with the user's expectations.

The diagnostic reports are obtained automatically, by analysis of the time stamps recorded in the site log files. The main premises for the analysis are:

  • The time elapsed before a page event is recorded is typically shorter for automatic pages than for user activated pages

  • Visitors who navigate the site for exploration navigate faster than those who search for a particular item or perform a particular task

  • Certain navigation pattern are typical to situations of visitor confusion, but these patterns are also common to situations of task completion or exploration

  • The navigation patterns of exploratory navigation are different from those of task driven navigation.

The way the reports are obtained from the log files are the follows:

  • The quality of references is determined by analysis of the time elapsed from the moment of display of a previous page until starting the download of the reported page

  • The system response time is determined by analysis of the time elapsed from the start to the end of the page download

  • The compatibility of information with the user's expectations is determined by analysis of the time elapsed form the finish of the page download until starting the download of the next page.

There are two reports associated with each aspect of the user experience, all of them about the level of acceptance by the users: 

  • Reports about extremely high values, typically revealing problems of user difficulties in reading or comprehending what they read  

  • Reports about extremely low values, typically revealing problems involving user mistakes.

 Each of the reports is actually a list of selected pages, presented in descending order of the problem severity.

 Each page in each report has a More link that enables to view details about the selected page. Click the More link to get these details.