"Here, Let Me Help": An Empirical Study of User Interventions in Human-Web Agent Collaboration

Web agents aim to execute complex online tasks from high-level instructions, yet fully autonomous execution remains challenging in practice. We present an empirical study of user interventions in human–web agent collaboration, moving beyond outcome-based metrics to examine how interventions unfold during execution. We conducted a controlled in-lab study with 30 participants whose interactions reflected early-stage web agent adoption across 12 structured tasks in shopping, travel, and information-seeking domains using live websites. Analyzing interaction logs, user inputs, and screen recordings, we identify diverse behaviors and propose a taxonomy capturing both the reasons for intervention and the forms they take. We distinguish explicit interventions, where users halt or override actions, from implicit interventions, where users guide or prepare the environment without stopping execution. Our findings reveal how task structure and execution breakdowns shape intervention behaviors to provide process-level evidence for designing web agents that better support users as active collaborators.