#30883
Data Mining and Predictive Analytics, Part 1
The cluster analysis process looks for groups of visitors in the data, where the people within the groups have something in common but the commonality is different from group to group.
Mason, Neil. ClickZ (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis
#30884
Data Mining and Predictive Analytics, Part 2
In part one of this series, I examined visitor segmentation, a data-mining technique. Now, let's look at how data mining can be used to understand important visitor behavior over time.
Mason, Neil. ClickZ (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis
#30881
Web Measurement Strategies for Small Businesses
Tools to build an effective Web measurement strategy on a tight budget.
Mason, Neil. ClickZ (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis
#32270
Site Navigation and Its Impact on the Content Viewed by the Virtual Scholar: A Deep Log Analysis 
is paper presents early findings of a unique analysis that related questionnaire data to site usage as recorded in the transaction log reports of ScienceDirect, for the same people. Its focus is the differences in the online behaviour of three types of navigational users: those accessing the site via a gateway (either via a reference hyperlink or subject search facility), those using the on site search facility and those employing menus. Towards this end 16,865 sessions were analysed and grouped by navigational entry and compared over three types of online behaviour: the viewing of articles in press (AIP), the number of different journals viewed in a session and the viewing of old material. A strong association was found between form of navigation and behavioural trait. Those using menus were more likely to view AIPs, while those using the search facility were more likely to view a greater number of different journals and were more likely to view older material. This supports a hypothesis proposed by Nicholas et al. (2006) that use of the online searching facility increases the visibility of material irrespective of journal and age and results in a greater use of older material and a more diverse journal use compared to other online and off-line information retrieval methods. Although research has been undertaken on the different strategies that users employ to navigate and find their way around a collection of content (e.g. a digital library), this we believe is the first time the effect of different navigational strategies on outcomes (for example, what is viewed) has been investigated.
Huntington, Paul, David Nicholas and Hamid R. Jamali. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis
#32291
Web Robot Detection in the Scholarly Information Environment
An increasing number of robots harvest information on the world wide web for a wide variety of purposes. Protocols developed at the inception of the web laid out voluntary procedures in order to identify robot behaviour, and exclude it if necessary. Few robots now follow this protocol and it is now increasingly difficult to filter for this activity in reports of on-site activity. This paper seeks to demonstrate the issues involved in identifying robots and assessing their impact on usage in regard to a project which sought to establish the relative usage patterns of open access and non-open access articles in the Oxford University Press published journal Glycobiology, which offers in a single issue articles in both forms. A number of methods for identifying robots are compared and together these methods found that 40% of the raw logs of this journal could be attributed to robots.
Huntington, Paul, David Nicholas and Hamid R. Jamali. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Research>Online
#33998
Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.
Boyd, Danah and Nicole B. Ellison. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Social Networking
#34188
Why We Search: Visualizing and Predicting User Behavior 
The aggregation and comparison of behavioral patterns on the WWW represent a tremendous opportunity for understanding past behaviors and predicting future behaviors. In this paper, we take a first step at achieving this goal. We present a large scale study correlating the behaviors of Internet users on multiple systems ranging in size from 27 million queries to 14 million blog posts to 20,000 news articles. We formalize a model for events in these time-varying datasets and study their correlation. We have created an interface for analyzing the datasets, which includes a novel visual artifact, the DTWRadar, for summarizing differences between time series. Using our tool we identify a number of behavioral properties that allow us to understand the predictive power of patterns of use.
Adar, Eytan, Daniel S. Weld, Brian N. Bershad and Steven D. Gribble. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Research
#34537
Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations
Even the tiniest amount of empirical facts (say, observing 2 users) vastly improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Research
#34901
ごくごく小規模な経験的な事実（例えば、観察対象のユーザが2人）からでも、そこから得られる事実はUIデザインに対して、正しい判断ができる確率を大きく高めてくれる。
Nielsen, Jakob. Usability.gr.jp (2009). (Japanese) Articles>Web Design>Usability>Research
#35272
Deconstructing Analysis Techniques
On a recent project I needed to collect and analyze the content management templates in use across a large enterprise Intranet. We were looking to inventory the diversity of templates in use; whether they existed outside or within the enterprise content management system; what changes might be made to the ‘official’ template set to reduce the overall number of templates, and to prepare for the migration of all content to a new design a few months down the track. I looked around at the literature for information architecture and Web design generally and found quite a few references to content inventories and content analysis, but nothing on analyzing templates.
Baty, Steve. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Research>Methods>Web Design
