An adaptive website system to improve efficiency with web mining techniques

The paper proposes an adaptive web system—that is, a website that is capable of changing its original design to fit user requirements. For the purpose of improving shortcomings of the website, and also to make it much easier for users to access information, the system analyzes user browsing patterns from their access records. This paper concentrates on the operating-efficiency of a website—that is, the efficiency with which a group of users browse a website. By achieving high efficiency, users spend less operating cost to accomplish a desired user goal. Based on user access data, we analyze each user's operating activities as well as their browsing sequences. With this data, we can calculate a measure of the efficiency of the user's browsing sequences. The paper develops an algorithm to accurately calculate this efficiency and to suggest how to increase the efficiency of user operations. This can be achieved in two ways: (i) by adding a new link between two web pages, or (ii) by suggesting to designers to reconsider existing inefficient links so as to allow users to arrive at their target pages more quickly. Using this algorithm, we develop a prototype to prove the concept of efficiency. The implementation is an adaptive website system to automatically change the website architecture according to user browsing activities and to improve website usability from the viewpoint of efficiency.