Section: New Results

Towards the FOCUS platform for an inter-disicplinary Approach For Mining Collective Usage

Participants : Bernard Senach, Brigitte Trousse.

In 2006 AxIS has began to set up a new method for web site evaluation, articulating usage mining approach and human factors expertise (cf. our 2006 annual report). The first study during the MobiVIP Project [102] showed that combining Ergonomic and Web usage Mining Approaches was very fruitful and we want to go further in this direction. A rapid analysis of the state of the art as shown that the two INRIA research teams which have their focus on user interface design and evaluation (In-situ and Merlin) as well as other French academic laboratories (LIC/IIHM, LIG/Multicom, IRIT/I3C) and specialized laboratories in usage analysis (Laboratoires des Usages: Marsouin, LUCE, Lutin, Lucsi, LDU of Sophia Antipolis), do not presently use data mining technologies when evaluating web sites. Due to the rate at which usability evaluation methods have to be run after design changes, the international effort is mainly oriented toward automatization of the evaluation processes. Previous attempts have tried to compute web metrics (e.g. Rating Game, WebTango, etc.), to connect log files analysis and task interaction models (for instance, QUIP, KALDI ) or to implement human factors expertise in knowledge bases (for instance: Sherlock, Ergoval, Synop, Ergo-conceptor). As full automatization is still often decepting, we believe much more in a cognitive coupling in which web site evaluation relies both on human ability and powerful technologies. The effort will be pursued with the FOCUS platform (see 8.1.6 ) and the started thesis of E. Smirnova on mining social networks..