Gideon Replay: A library to replay interactions in web-applications

Abstract

Provenance research has gained attention in recent years. While this initially gave rise to many proprietary solutions, more recently some free libraries have been released that enable provenance tracking in almost any web application. In this regard, these solutions rely on the tracking of states and state changes within the application. However, essential information, e.g., whether a user hesitated at certain points when clicking, is lost or cannot be extracted from a state view. In order to address this issue, we have developed Gideon Replay: A publicly, freely available library that can be integrated into any web application with just a few lines of code to record and replay user interactions such as mouse clicks and keystrokes. Interaction replays can be controlled through a web player interface, which shows activity types and idle times as well as an attention heat map. In addition, we enable the export of all interactions for later analysis.

Keywords

• Human-centered computing
• Visualization systems and tools
• Analytic provenance
• User studies