#15 Develop a log analysis / conversion tool

[Richard Mitchell]

"Analysis and interpretation of quantitative data from usability tools is in itself a vast topic, which will only be briefly discussed here. Although the logs output from the solution are in a standardized format, which is very readable, it does lack a tool designed to meet the needs for analysis of the potentially very large amounts of quantitative data.

One method to assess the quantitative data produced, as mentioned briefly in section 1.1.7 would be to create a tool that could replay a user’s session based on the event data recorded in the log. Whilst this could be very useful in some circumstances, it does require a large amount of data to be gathered and would certainly not be suitable in every case.

An arguably more common and useful method of interpreting the data would be using traditional and statistical analysis in order to produce graphs and other useful representations of data. This could be achieved by providing a tool to convert the output log into another format used by an existing tool, or through the creation of a special purpose tool to specifically interpret XML log files meeting the schema defined by this project."

~ Mitchell, R. (2008)