Understanding Web Usage:
Finding the Person Behind the Browser

The UWU tool is entirely browser-based, so essentially the only thing you need is a browser and access to the Lucent Intranet. Currently, we require the latest version of Netscape (Version 4.04 or higher). In addition, to facilitate the interactive capabilities of UWU, both Java and JavaScript must be enabled.

When you first open UWU, a tool bar will appear carrying various options for viewing statistical summaries of usage data. At the right, we display simple tabular displays, complete with thumbnails of the indicated pages that appear when you mousover table entries.

In addition, various Java plots have been incorporated into UWU, making it trivial for the user to display the number of visitors accessing a page or directory by time of day or calendar day. It is possible to use these statistical displays to further drill into the data, ultimately finding specific visitors.

When you load UWU, an auxiliary browsing window opens that directs the statistical displays shown above. This is perhaps one of the most important features of our tool. As you click on links in this window, the statistical information is constantly updating. For example, the plot of visits to a particular part of the site (displayed above) is constantly refreshing as you click through your site in this auxiliary window.

In this way, you can have immediate access to usage data for every page on your site. It is also possible to drill into your usage data by interacting with the various statistical displays. For example, by clicking on the line plot above, you can retrieve all of the visits to the page displayed in the browser window (left).

This information can be summarized by clustering visitors into groups based on their usage patterns, or a simple table of all the visits can be displayed. In either case, the requests for a given visit can be obtained directly from this presentation.

Finally, in keeping the spirit of not ignoring the content on a Web site, we have also designed displays of usage data that overlay directly onto a Web page. In the figure on the right, the red targets are sized according to the proportion of visitors leave that the page by selecting the marked link.

UWU has been motivated by two ideas. The first is to keep the Web site content as close to the statistics as possible. Within the tool, you browse your site as you normally would, but in the process, receive information about your visitors. One byproduct of this idea is that statistics are then immediately available for every page. This is unique among log analysis tools. The next major idea involves your visitors. We want to convey as much information about them as possible, but without overwhelming you with meaningless statistics. Therefore, you are able to drill right down to the level of a single visit and see what requests were issued. Soon, higher level summaries will replace our lists, providing UWU users with even more insight.

For more information contact Mark Hansen or Wim Sweldens uwu@bell-labs.com