Consistency of Task Trees Generated from Website Usage Traces

Task trees are an established method for modeling the usage of a website as required to accomplish user tasks. They define the necessary actions and the order in which users need to perform them to reach a certain goal. Modeling task trees manually can be a laborious task, especially if a website is rather complex. In previous work, we presented a methodology for automatically generating task trees based on recorded user actions on a website. We did not verify, if the approach generates similar results for different recordings of the same website. Only if this is given, the task trees can be the basis for a subsequent analysis of the usage of a website, e.g., a usability analysis. In this paper, we evaluate our approach in this respect. For this, we generated task trees for different sets of recorded user actions of the same website and compared the resulting task trees. Our results show, that the generated task trees are consistent but that the level of consistency depends on the type of website or the ratio of possible to recorded actions on a website.