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arXiv · 2604.07929

Same Outcomes, Different Journeys: A Trace-Level Framework for Comparing Human and GUI-Agent Behavior in Production Search Systems

Maria Movin·Claudia Hauff·Aron Henriksson·Panagiotis Papapetrou
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Abstract

LLM-driven GUI agents are increasingly used in production systems to automate workflows and simulate users for evaluation and optimization. Yet most GUI-agent evaluations emphasize task success and provide limited evidence on whether agents interact in human-like ways. We present a trace-level evaluation framework that compares human and agent behavior across (i) task outcome and effort, (ii) query formulation, and (iii) navigation across interface states. We instantiate the framework in a controlled study in a production audio-streaming search application, where 39 participants and a state-of-the-art GUI agent perform ten multi-hop search tasks. The agent achieves task success comparable to participants and generates broadly aligned queries, but follows systematically different navigation strategies: participants exhibit content-centric, exploratory behavior, while the agent is more search-centric and low-branching. These results show that outcome and query alignment do not imply behavioral alignment, motivating trace-level diagnostics when deploying GUI agents as proxies for users in production search systems.

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Maria Movin, Claudia Hauff, Aron Henriksson, Panagiotis Papapetrou. 2026-04-09. Same Outcomes, Different Journeys: A Trace-Level Framework for Comparing Human and GUI-Agent Behavior in Production Search Systems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07929

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