[IxDA Discuss] Application logs of user interactions

[Alexander Baxevanis]

Hi Russell,

I have something like this on a previous research project, it was a
piece of multimedia software for teaching music to young children. The
events logged were pretty high-level, e.g. "lesson opened", "practice
session started", "audio settings dialog invoked" etc. So we did not
have to do any low-level tinkering with the UI toolkit in order to
capture low-level events, we just wrote a couple of functions to
append lines to a log file. The purpose was to monitor the use of
different application features during a 2-week-long trial.
Unfortunately the trial was run by one of our research partners in
another country, so I'm not sure if and how they eventually used the
tracking data.

As with all kinds of user research, I guess you need to think what
you're trying to find out before implementing something like this. If
you do need low level events such as button presses, it's a good idea
to somehow map them to higher-level actions, and to design the log
file in a way that is convenient for later filtering with an automated
tool.

Hope this helps,

Alex

On 4/30/07, Wilson, Russell <Russell.Wilson at netqos.com> wrote:
> Has anyone worked with or had success with implementing hooks
>
> within an application to log user interactions?
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> For example, each time a user clicks a specific button, the button
>
> would append a line of text to a log file "pressed [button]"...
>
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>
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> Russell Wilson | Director of Product Design
> NetQoS, Inc. | 5001 Plaza on the Lake, Austin, TX 78746
> 512.334.3725 | russell.wilson at netqos.com
> <mailto:russell.wilson at netqos.com>
>
> NetQoS: Performance Experts
> www.netqos.com <http://www.netqos.com/>
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