Research On Visualization Techniques For Web Usability Analysis

There are always some problems in present web sites, which make people feel difficult during browsing. In order to identify and overcome these usability problems, web site usability analysis is in great requirement. Presently, a main method to analyze the usability of web site is observing and analyzing users' action, collecting the relevant data. Yet the huge amount data make it difficult to find problems. To solve this problem, we need to use visualization techniques to visualize the invisible information to some form that can be applied by the usability expert to research. The aim of visualization techniques is to visualize the invisible data, so that the visualized form is conform to people's need.Focus on the question, we conduct some experimental research on the visualization techniques of web usability analysis, design and develop an assistant tool for usability analysis - SUAT (Site Usability Analysis Tool). Using this tool I select several sites to do case study and system improvements. The result shows that using SUAT can help usability expert effectively find the usability problems that are prone to be overlooked otherwise, what's more it can improve the efficiency and make the judgment more accurate.In this paper, the conception of usability, main methods of web usability engineering, the requirement of using visualization techniques in web usability study and the visualization techniques on web analysis are briefly introduced. Based on these study, the experiment research of the visualization techniques on web on two aspects. (1) Analysis, design and application of SUAT, (2) Case study and system improvement are also presented. The conclusion of the research and the direction of further study are pointed out in the last part of this paper.