Logging and analyzing user's interactions in web portals

Content Management Systems and Web Portal Frameworks are more and more widely adopted in Web development. Those kinds of software often produce Web pages whose layout is divided in sections called, in the case of Web Portals, "portlets". Portlets can be produced by different sources and then aggregated in the same page by the portal. For Web portals, traditional Web metrics based on page visits can be inadequate for fully understanding user's interest, due to the heterogeneity of content and the variety of sources. This paper proposes a system for evaluating the Web traffic at a deeper level than the page visit one: the level of the sections, or of the portlets. The interest of the user in the sections of the page is gauged through implicit interest indicators, such as, section visibility, mouse movements and other client-side interactions. Our system is composed of two different products: a framework that, opportunely instantiated in a Web portal, allows the production of a log, and a log analyzer. The possible uses and benefits gained by research in the fields of Web traffic analysis, portal design and usability are investigated in depth. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.