Developing contemporary web-based interaction logging infrastructure: The design and challenges of LogUI

Studies involving user interfaces typically involve the capturing and recording (logging) of key user interactions between the user and the system being examined. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that researchers often implement their own logging infrastructure-sometimes in a piecemeal fashion-which can lead to numerous implementation mistakes (due to misunderstanding or ignoring differences between web browsers, for example). While efforts have been made to develop interaction logging solutions for experimentation and commercial use, many solutions either use obsolete technology, are prohibitively expensive, are complex to use (and require extensive programming knowledge), or have no source code available. To address these issues, we have developed LogUI, an easy-to-use yet powerful interaction logging framework that can capture virtually any user interaction within a web-based environment. LogUI has been successfully used in several user studies since its launch. This paper provides an in-depth discussion into how we have designed LogUI, and provides narrative on the key challenges that we are looking to address moving forward.