Web Sites Need Much More User-Driven Interactivity

Websites present information or services but often do not allow users to provide feedback or ask questions. The topic of this paper is to first discuss various types of interactivities that are currently available, and then explain what one would expect from advanced systems. The article makes it clear that much has still to be developed. We start by mentioning a number of currently used approaches and show that they almost exclusively belong to a category we call “provider-driven”. They miss the very desirable possibility of what we call “user-driven” feedback that is, at the most, available in a very rudimentary form. We then present some user-driven feedback attempts that culminate with a description of some of the features of a new system NID (for Net-Interactive Documents). We analyze and describe the first results obtained and, finally, summarize to show what future systems should provide.