Mouse Tracking to Assess Enterprise Portal Efficiency

This article advocates mouse tracking as an emerging method to include in corporate enterprise portal usability assessment. Issues of Web site usability testing are discussed, with mouse tracking as one method that should be given consideration in assessing enterprise portals. Usability testing is part of the process of assessing how well a machine or application does its job. Efficiency is in turn one component of usability, but is perhaps one of the most important components with regard to Web sites that are designed to serve as corporate enterprise portals. An enterprise portal is an organization’s Website that functions to deliver internal employees or external partners or customers to organizational information, applications, or services. If a portal functions as a gateway that delivers the user to something of specific interest, then efficiency of delivery is naturally an important factor in assessing that gateway. An efficient or inefficient internal corporate enterprise portal, or intranet, could result in worker productivity gains or losses, with a substantial collective impact on an organization’s labor costs alone. An external corporate enterprise portal, or extranet, that services important organizational suppliers and customers could either build or erode multi-million dollar relationships through its efficiency and ease of use. A portal associated with retail sales could gain or lose substantial revenues, depending on its effectiveness in shuttling prospective buyers to appropriate products. In this article’s discussion of mouse tracking as a way to test the efficiency of an enterprise portal, the perspective is on a portal that is being used as a gateway that guides users to their own objectives. In some cases, a portal might be used to guide users to a target action that benefits the enterprise, as in the case of a retailer’s Web site that is used by final consumers. A retail portal might be considered effective if it guides a user’s interest toward high-profit products and holds the user on the Web site longer in the hopes that more revenue will be generated. In this article, however, the perspective is on an enterprise portal that assists users such as employees and business partners in finding information, applications, or services with a minimum investment of the user’s time and effort. From this latter perspective on the non-commercial, utilitarian objectives of an enterprise portal, interest is in cost-cutting efficiencies, not in revenue generation. bacKground