Explaining difficulty navigating a website using page view data

A user's behaviour on a web site can tell us something about that user's experience. In particular, we believe there are simple signals---including circling back to previous pages, and swapping out to a search engine---that indicate difficulty navigating a site. Simple page view patterns from web server logs correlate with these signals and may explain them. Extracting these patterns can help web authors understand where, and why, their sites are confusing or hard to navigate. We illustrate these ideas with data from almost a million sessions on a government website. In this case a small number of page view patterns are present in almost a third of difficult sessions, suggesting possible improvements to website language or design. We also introduce a tool for web authors, which makes this analysis available in the context of the site itself.