Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Winter 2020
Enhancing the Usability of DOM Explorer
Dieter Verhufen
SCS Honours Project Image
ABSTRACT
With the ever increasing importance of the online world and websites, the issue of the ability to trust the websites we use everyday has become increasingly important. Despite this, there is a distinct lack of tools designed to enable users, especially relatively inexperienced users, to figure out which websites they should trust and continue to trust. DOM Explorer is a tool that was designed to help solve this problem by giving users a tool allowing them to see how much change has occurred on their favourite websites over a given amount of time. The current project is an improved version of DOM Explorer that was designed to have a better user experience for non-expert users. DOM Explorer v1 was examined and the issues affecting the usability of the extension were identified. This, in turn, led to several improvements being made to the project. These included the addition of colored lights to enable easier reading of the percentage change in the website. Statistics and charts such as information about the DOMs examined in the calculation and number of lines added or removed from the DOM were also added. Finally, the calculation used to come up with the percentage was also changed in order to give a more accurate measure of similarity. Several real world examples were examined, including Facebook and Google, in order to demonstrate these changes.