The Design of an Integrated Web Mining and Usability System

Web usability is an important and sometimes controversial research area. We review the different approaches to web usability and illustrate that the factors influencing Web usability are often incompletely analyzed. We proposed an integrated system for web mining and usability study where four core modules are designed to address the fundamental issues in usability analysis. The integrated approach allows a totalistic view of the web usability and facilitates analysis across different modules. As an example to cross modules analysis, we apply association rule mining from the link structure obtained from web mining module to automatically discover menus and structures in a web site. Furthermore, such mining tools allow the decoupling of the design-based link structure from the contextual-based link structure.