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Track user movement

Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 8:30 am
by lepad
Hi everyone

I got a question about keeping history of user movement on an application. The application is a small tool that's used for organizing user data. There's not functionality to it: A user can basically create entries which he can then edit, assign to another entry or delete them (I know, not a very detailed description, but there's little point in describing the tool any further ;)). There's a rather small user base (10-20 user online at one time).

Now, I have to keep an history of what a user does exactly (what pages he visits, which part of the application he uses, what data he processes). For that I will implement a tracking system. However, I'm rather unsure about the format of the history to be kept. I have a database at my disposal as well as full file access. So my question would be: What sort of tracking would be more suited for this task?

A file system would be very easy to accomplish, would be quite fast and I could create backups quite easily.
On the other hand, using a database would feel more secure and I would actually have an easy time querying the results.

Can you please provide some more insight and help me with my decision?

Much appreciated ;)

Re: Track user movement

Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 8:57 am
by Christopher
Have you though about using the webserver logs and a webstats package? Some of them have this kind of functionality.

Re: Track user movement

Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 10:02 am
by lepad
Thank you for your reply, aborint.

I have in fact thought about it and I agree that most of the functionality I need are included in a webstats package. There are several factors, such as company policies, in place that prevent me from using something that's not written by myself (yes, it's quite a hassle ;))

Re: Track user movement

Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2008 12:05 pm
by Christopher
Web logs are pretty easy to parse. Perhaps you could look at one of the open source packages and see how they are doing it.

Re: Track user movement

Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2008 9:19 am
by josh
You need to do live usability testing. Mouse movement != eye movement, and its probably hit or miss to try to deduce anything meaningful. You really need to do real usability testing if you want accurate metrics.

Re: Track user movement

Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 4:22 pm
by The_Anomaly
Not sure if it applies here, but Google Analytics is insanely wonderful.