Research Article Identifying User Interaction Patterns in E-Textbooks

Copyright © 2015 Santeri Saarinen et al.This is an open access article distributed under theCreativeCommonsAttribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We introduce a new architecture for e-textbooks which contains two navigational aids: an index and a concept map. We report results from an evaluation in a university setting with 99 students. The interaction sequences of the users were captured during the user study. We found several clusters of user interaction types in our data. Three separate user types were identified based on the interaction sequences: passive user, term clicker, and concept map user. We also discovered that with the concept map interface users started to interact with the application significantly sooner than with the index interface. Overall, our findings suggest that analysis of interaction patterns allows deeper insights into the use of e-textbooks than is afforded by summative evaluation. 1