Web Augmentation as a Technique to Diminish User Interactions in Repetitive Tasks

Abstract

The use of the World Wide Web has experienced extraordinary growth in the last decades. The Web has become the main source of information for millions of users. The number of websites offering content to users is countless. In order to personalise information according to their needs, users often have to visit multiple, unconnected pages. Users perform a number of actions to collect that information that requires concentration. If the number of Web resources is large, the activity becomes unpleasant. The problem increases when these tasks are performed frequently and repetitively. These tasks are time-consuming and lead users to experience frustration and disorientation during the activity, causing a loss of concentration that prolongs the activity over time. Web Augmentation combines different Web technologies to improve user experience on existing pages by adding content from different pages among other benefits. This article proposes Web Augmentation as a technique to reduce user interactions in repetitive tasks. To support the proposal, the paper introduces Excore, a browser extension for Web Augmentation that allows end-users to add content from different resources automatically. The article presents the benefits introduced by this approach as a response to the drawbacks experienced by users while performing their activities on the Web. The architecture of the platform and its operations are described by means of an example. A double evaluation of the extension is addressed, one qualitative and one quantitative. The results show that Excore reduces the number of interactions by 94.45% and the time to complete a task by 80.75%.