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Mission Impossible ? Capturing rich yet natural user behaviour on the Web across locations and devices

It is often desirous to obtain a full picture of users’ web behaviours and activities across a variety of browsing environments. This is challenging due to the wide variety of “normal” environments possible; differences in location, device, web browser, and settings fluctuate both across participants and for each participant. Web data collection tools are required that are able to capture a broad range of data elements and work within multiple environments. This paper reflects on the data collection process undertaken as we investigated how people perceive the privacy of visited pages if others are able to later see traces of that activity. We wanted to capture the majority of participants’ web browsing and we did not want our logging of this information to affect their normal browsing environment or patterns. Our data collection choice, a browser helper object, resulted in a minimal impact on the participants’ web environment, but limited the types of contextual data we could collect and restricted the population we could study. This paper also includes a discussion of ongoing data analysis challenges and a visualization tool, VOLTS.