Discovering the Gap Between Web Site Designers' Expectations and Users' Behavior

Takehiro Nakayama	Solution Development Center,ISC
Hiroki Kato	Solution Development Center,ISC
Yohei Yamane	Solution Development Center,ISC

Abstract

This paper proposes a technique that discovers the gap between Web site designers' expectations and users' behavior. The former are assessed by measuring the inter-page conceptual relevance and the latter by measuring the inter-page access co-occurrence. The discovery of pages that are conceptually related but rarely co-occur in visits suggests areas where Web site design improvement would be appropriate. Further, the technique suggests how to apply quantitative data obtained through a multiple regression analysis that predicts hyperlink traversal frequency from page layout features. The effectiveness of the technique is validated by case studies. Keywords; Web site design; conceptual relevance; access co-occurrence; regression analysis

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