Year

2016

Season

Spring

Paper Type

Master's Thesis

College

College of Computing, Engineering & Construction

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer and Information Sciences (MS)

Department

Computing

NACO controlled Corporate Body

University of North Florida. School of Computing

First Advisor

Dr. Karthikeyan Umapathy

Second Advisor

Dr. Ching-Hua Chuan

Third Advisor

Dr. Sherif Elfayoumy

Department Chair

Dr. Sherif Elfayoumy

College Dean

Dr. Mark A. Tumeo

Abstract

Web designers are expected to perform the difficult task of adapting a site’s design to fit changing usage trends. Web analytics tools give designers a window into website usage patterns, but they must be analyzed and applied to a website's user interface design manually. A framework for marrying live analytics data with user interface design could allow for interfaces that adapt dynamically to usage patterns, with little or no action from the designers. The goal of this research is to create a framework that utilizes web analytics data to automatically update and enhance web user interfaces. In this research, we present a solution for extracting analytics data via web services from Google Analytics and transforming them into reporting data that will inform user interface improvements. Once data are extracted and summarized, we expose the summarized reports via our own web services in a form that can be used by our client side User Interface (UI) framework. This client side framework will dynamically update the content and navigation on the page to reflect the data mined from the web usage reports. The resulting system will react to changing usage patterns of a website and update the user interface accordingly. We evaluated our framework by assigning navigation tasks to users on the UNF website and measuring the time it took them to complete those tasks, one group with our framework enabled, and one group using the original website. We found that the group that used the modified version of the site with our framework enabled was able to navigate the site more quickly and effectively.

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