Enhancing Web Usability using User Behavior and Cognitive Study

Abstract

In this era of technology, internet has gained huge popularity and web presence is an important aspect for success of any e-business. This paper presents a new method which focuses on two most important principles of web design i.e. functional convenience and presentational delight for enhancing the web usability. For improving functional convenience the actual usage patterns are extracted from web server logs for an e-commerce website. These logs are firstly preprocessed to detect users, user sessions and user transactions and then an usage mining method is applied to determine actual usage paths through the clickstreams. The actual usage paths will help to identify the usability issues and help suggest the corrective measures to improve it. For improving presentational delight a survey is taken to identify the user's perspective for making web design efficient. This cognitive study of user and actual user behavior help to identify the different usability issues. Based on these issues the different procedures are listed for design improvement.