The Bloodhound project: Automating discovery of web usability issues using the InfoScent simulator

According to usability experts, the top user issue for Web sites is difficult navigation. We have been developing automated usability tools for several years, and here we describe a prototype service called InfoScent ™ Bloodhound Simulator, a push-button navigation analysis system, which automatically analyzes the information cues on a Web site to produce a usability report. We further build upon previous algorithms to create a method called Information Scent Absorption Rate, which measures the navigability of a site by computing the probability of users reaching the desired destinations on the site. Lastly, we present a user study involving 244 subjects over 1385 user sessions that shows how Bloodhound correlates with real users surfing for information on four Web sites. The hope is that, by using