This presentation will examine web use recorders, a new technology for unobtrusively monitoring web usage that has the potential for dramatically improving web analytics. Web use recorders characterize the actions of web users on a particular site in fine-grained detail, not just page visits and time spent on a given page, but where clicks occurred, scrolling, and cursor hovering without clicking. The recording is server-side, automated, and transparent to the user. To date, the commercial products based on this capability offer the ability to “playback” individual web browsing sessions, provide rudimentary compilations of summary metrics, and display “heatmap” visualizations of the density of clicks and hovers.

Our presentation will explore the potential for this capability to provide a new generation of web analytic tools for providing insights into naturalistic user behaviors and design quality. We will show examples of the data provided by web use recorders, contrast them with conventional web analytic tools, speculate about their potential for providing insights regarding user experiences and usability, and suggest the kinds of research that are needed to fully realize this potential. We will review some of the research that has already been reported using web recorder technology and show examples from our own initial attempts to explore the utility of this capability.