Project Clio : SamR's Initial Design Notes

These are a few of my notes on the design of Project Clio, our web use analysis system.

Selected Users

• Faculty, interested in evaluating and understanding student use of webs.
• Software developers, interested in evaluating customer use of their help pages.
• Salespeople, interested in which products generate the most interest.
• Publishers, interested in which portions of their publications people read.
• Institutions, interested in what perspective people get on their institution from the web.

Selected Questions

• How do people get to our pages?
• Where do they go once they're there?
• How do they leave?
• How often do search engines and web crawlers visit our pages?
• How often are our pages accessed? How much time do readers spend on each page?
• What do they read?
• Who reads my pages?

Selected Features

• Summarize the log (or portions thereof)
  • Files, machines, paths
  • Textually, sorted in various ways
  • Visually
• Plot usage over time
• Select or deselect elements from the log
  • By time
  • By machine or set of machines
  • By page or set of pages
• Permit gradual exploration of dataset
• Animate visits (watch paths people take)
• Code categories of pages, and ask for "code strings" to summarize visits. For example, I might code all of my outlines as "O", all of my assignments as "A", and so on and so forth. I might then look for AOA-type patterns.

Some Other Issues

• We want to provide some modicum of privacy for the users of our web, even if they may not assume that they are receiving that privacy.
• We may need to modify our server or add extensions to our pages to get additional data:
  • Source documents
  • Time on page
  • Links taken