Visualization has been used very successfully in helping people understand various kinds of phenomena, both real and abstract. Hence it is a natural choice for understanding the behavior of Web users. Pitkow, et al [PB94] have developed the WebViz system for visualizing WWW access patterns. A Web path paradigm is proposed in which sets of server log entries are used to extract subsequences of Web traversal patterns called Web paths. WebViz allows the analyst to selectively analyze the portion of the Web that is of interest by filtering out the irrelevant portions. The Web is visualized as a directed graph with cycles, where nodes are pages and edges are (inter-page) hyperlinks.
The visualization is composed of two windows, the WebViz control window and the display window [PB94]. The first provides the analyst with controls to adjust the bindings, select a specific time to view, control the animation, and rearrange the layout. The second window's arrangement allows a document's access frequency to be represented by the width of the node representing it, while the node's color represents it recency of access. Link width and color have corresponding meanings. Temporal manipulation is achieved by either the slider of by playback controls.