User Behavior Mining

Studying the behavior of users in software systems has become an essential task for software vendors who want to mitigate usability problems and identify automation potentials, or for researchers who want to test behavioral theories. One approach to studying user behavior in a data-driven way is through the analysis of so-called user interaction (UI) logs, which record the low-level activities that a user performs while executing a task. In the paper, the authors refer to the analysis of UI logs as User Behavior Mining (UBM) and position it as a research topic. UBM is conceptualized by means of a four-component framework that elaborates how UBM data can be captured, which technologies can be applied to analyze it, which objectives UBM can accomplish, and how theories can guide the analytical process. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated by three exemplary applications from an ongoing research project with a partner company. Finally, the paper discusses practical challenges to UBM and derives an agenda for potential future research directions.