The Wrapper: An Open Source Application for Logging User - System Interactions during Searching Studies

Conducting user studies and user evaluations of information retrieval systems requires the collection of specialized data, namely user interactions with the system. These interactions occur both on the server and the client side. Collecting the client-side data in a format for easy analysis has proven to be a difficult task for many researchers. In this paper, we report on a software application that logs user interactions with information searching systems. Developed in Visual Basic, the application is simple to install, ease to modify, and logs session actions to an ASCII text file for easy upload into a variety of analysis packages. The application records many of the typical user interactions with searching systems, including submitted queries, Web site navigation, scrolling, bookmarking, among others. The application time stamps each interaction. Interested researchers may download the application via a provided uniform resource locator