What Did My Users Experience? Discovering Visual Stimuli on Graphical User Interfaces of the Web

Main tasks of usability experts for Web sites comprise the analysis of user interaction behavior on graphical user interfaces, the discovery of issues, and the derivation of improvements to the interface. The analysis of user interaction behavior and corresponding discovery of issues are made difficult by modern Web interfaces that incorporate dynamic interface elements and that orchestrate complex reactions to user responses. We propose a semi-automated approach for discovering visual stimuli, which capture summarized views of the interface as encountered by users during interaction. Discovered visual stimuli allow for meaningful aggregations of user interactions based on what users encountered on the interface such that the analysis by usability experts can relate the interface views with user interactions correctly and identify arising issues. We provide WebVSD as an implementation of the approach and perform a set of evaluations with real-world Web sites that show the accuracy of proposed methods in isolation and in the tool chain, as well as case studies and a survey of usability experts indicating the usefulness of the suggested approach.