METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ENHANCED PATH ANALYSIS ON A WORLD WIDE WEB SITE

摘要

A centralized full-service research bureau assists a customer in designing a usability test for typical tasks faced by a visitor to the customer's web site. The test is administered to a pre-qualified pool of testers. A method and apparatus is provided for tracking the paths taken through the customer's web site by a population of testers in attempting to accomplish a predetermined series of objectives during the course of the usability test, and for performing subsequent analysis of the path information. The path data for individual testers are saved to a database and aggregated across the population of testers. A suite of software tools is provided that retrieves and presents the path data in various formats as report sections in a browser window. The suite of path analysis tools organize the path data in a manner that allows the customer or an analyst to discern patterns in the path data and assess the relevance and effectiveness of the various pages and sections of the target web site to the visitor's objectives, and to evaluate the visitor's experience as they navigate the web site. The disclosed method and software tools may also be used to analyze path data from conventional server log files.