Usability Tools for Tracking User Behaviors – Part II

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In the last article we had a look at Clickheat, a usability analysis tool. In this article, we’ll be looking at few other similar tools that can be used for tracking and analyzing user behaviors.

Bobby

This is an initiative taken by CAST for making World Wide Web more accessible to individuals with disabilities. This project has been in the industry for a decade and has helped both novice and professional web designers analyze and make improvements of their web sites. For the service this project has introduced, it has won number of awards from different bodies. From 2004, Watchfire sponsors the project as it was sold by CAST.

Due to the comprehensive accessibility coverage of Bobby, IBM has included this software in to IBM Rational Policy Tester Accessibility Edition and available widely from IBM.

ErgoLight

ErgoLight WebTester is a usability testing software which is focused on human factors. It emphasizes on user friendliness, usability and user reliability. On Dec 31, 1999, PC-Media wrote:

“Not all software developers can afford to use the services of usability labs. This is especially true for small software companies. The new products of ErgoLight Ltd. change the rules of this game. By tracking the details of site navigation on a central server and by intervention, WebTester provides the capability of usability validation to everybody.”

AWStats

AWStats is a free log file analyzer for famous web servers. Although this is not a full scale usability testing tool, this gives many information about user behaviors and application responses. This easy to install tool runs on Linux and can read log files of all famous web servers including Apache. You may have to tweak the logging format of the web server in the configuration files.

AWStats gives detailed information about the page hits, visiting IPs, visiting browsers, most accessed resources and user visiting trend over a period of time. This information can be used for placing valuable information on certain pages where most people do access.

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