The Bloodhound Project: Automating Discovery of Web Usability Issues using the InfoScentTM Simulator

According to usability experts, the top user issue for Web sites is difficult navigation. We have been developing automated usability tools for several years, and here we describe a prototype service called InfoScentTM Bloodhound Simulator, a push-button navigation analysis system, which automatically analyzes the information cues on a Web site to produce a usability report. We further build upon previous algorithms to create a method called Information Scent Absorption Rate, which measures the navigability of a site by computing the probability of users reaching the desired destinations on the site. Lastly, we present a user study involving 244 subjects over 1385 user sessions that show how Bloodhound correlates with real users surfing for information on four Web sites. The hope is that, by using a simulation of user surfing behavior, we can reduce the need for human labor during usability testing, thus dramatically lower testing costs, and ultimately improving user experience. The Bloodhound Project is unique in that we apply a concrete HCI theory directly to a real-world problem. The lack of empirically validated HCI theoretical model has plagued the development of our field, and this is a step toward that direction. Categories & Subject Descriptors: H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Multimedia Information Systems-Evaluation/methodology; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces--Benchmarking, Theory and methods; H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces—Web-based Interaction; H.3.4 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: System and Software—Performance evaluation; D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design Tools and Techniques--User interfaces; I.2.7 [Artificial Intelligence] Natural Language Processing--Text analysis General Terms: Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Measurement, Performance, Verification.