Auto recording of user behaviours in cloud IDE

• Main Author: Zhang, Chixiong
• Other Authors: Xing Zhenchang
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications::Social and behavioral sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62593
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Cloud computing, an emerging concept in computer science has brought many changes to the IT industry [15]. Cloud IDE, the practice of cloud computing in IDE field is getting popular among developers due to its convenience to use. However, there is a lack of attention to the HCI design of cloud IDE as well as other cloud applications. Differences in user behaviours are expected in cloud IDE, even though its functionalities are very similar to a traditional one. This project aims to develop a method to automatically collect user behaviour data when using cloud IDE for the purpose of HCI research and LA (Learning Analytics) in programming education. This method will be able to record all significant user behaviours within the cloud IDE as well as related behaviours within the browser. Useful information of each event should be kept as much as possible while the volume of the data should not be a trouble for further investigation. Moreover, final presentation of the data should be helpful for both HCI and LA research and. Hence this method will also provide data visualization solutions. In this project, Orion is chosen as the target cloud IDE. A Chrome extension was developed to detect user actions within Orion including clicking of buttons and links, as well as changing of IDE settings. This extension also detects user’s visits to other pages within the browser. Besides, a Chrome application was developed to record detected user behaviours and convert the data format to that required by visualization. As for visualization, SIMILE-Widget Timeline is used. Collected user behaviours are visualised as a stream of events in the timeline. All above three major parts of this project are put together as an application named as BehaveLogger. At the end of this project, BehaveLogger was successfully implemented and tested. It achieved the objective that to work as an assisting tool in HCI research of Orion and LA research of Programming. BehaveLogger collects useful user behaviour data that allows efficient analysing. More importantly, this project developed a method and framework for building a tool to automatically collect user behaviour data of any cloud application, that is developing a browser plugin to detect user’s action on the web page of the cloud application and recording them as a stream of events.