Teasing Apart and Piecing Together: Towards Understanding Web-based Interactions

Abstract

It is difficult to deeply understand web-based interactions and people’s use of information online. This makes it difficult to capture existing web experiences so they can be recreated in other systems (for example, to help with accessibility) and to move real-world situations to the web while maintaining the essential elements of the original situation (for example, creating digital equivalents of existing social environments). We describe TAPT, a tool for achieving this understanding, and we present a comparative evaluation of TAPT against using Scenarios or Group Discussion to capture user experience. We discuss the results of this evaluation, which suggests that while Scenarios can help capture specific experiences from certain types of user, and Group Discussion requires less effort, TAPT is superior at teasing out in a structured way the key elements that make an experience what it is. Our results show that TAPT could be a valuable tool for analysing and redesigning online experiences, and that the best approach to design may be to apply multiple methods in a complementary fashion.