VDHM: Viewport-DOM based Heat Maps as a tool for visually aggregating Web users’ interaction data from mobile and heterogenous devices

Knowing how users interact with Web contents is essential in order to design more effective Web pages and sites. A way to get the data needed for studying Web activity is via analytics tools that, given the amount of information to be processed, generally support the interpretation of results via graphics representations of either raw or aggregated data. With aggregated data, it is quite common to use heat maps, i.e., visual diagrams where colors can depict, among others, the amount of clicks/taps on a given region of the Web page or the areas that are reached more frequently when the page is scrolled. However, existing viewport-based solutions are not designed to aggregate data about the areas that received users’ attention when page visualization may change from one device to another. In this paper, a framework capable to support a better understanding of a Web page as a unique information container by collecting information about mobile users’ activity on multiple devices and visualizing it in an aggregated map on a per-element rather than a per-region basis is reported.