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Usability assessment of web applications continues to be an expensive and often neglected practice. While large companies are able to spare resources for studying and improving usability in their products, smaller businesses often divert theirs in other aspects. To help these cases, researches have devised automatic approaches for user interaction analysis, and there are commercial services that offer automated usability statistics at relatively low fees. However, most existing approaches still fall short in specifying the usability problems concretely enough to identify and suggest solutions. In this work we describe usability smells of user interaction, i.e., hints of usability problems on running web applications, and the process in which they can be identified by analyzing user interaction events. We also describe USF, the tool that implements the process in a fully automated way with minimum setup effort. USF analyses user interaction events on-the-fly, discovers usability smells and reports them together with a concrete solution in terms of a usability refactoring, providing usability advice for deployed web applications.

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Refactoring has been reported as a helpful technique to systematically improve nonfunctional attributes of software. This paper evaluates the relevance of refactoring for improving usability on web applications. We conducted an experiment with two replications at different locations, with subjects of different profiles. Objects chosen for the experiment were two e-commerce applications that exhibit common business processes in today's web usage. Through the experiment we found that half of the studied refactorings cause a significant improvement in usability. The rest of the refactorings required a post-hoc analysis in which we Empir Software Eng considered aspects like user expertise in the interaction with web applications or type of application. We conclude that, when improving quality in use, the success of the refactoring process depends on several factors, including the type of software system, context and users. We have analyzed all these aspects, which developers must consider for a better decision support at the time of prioritizing improvements and outweighing effort.

While Web applications have become pervasive in today's business, social interaction and information exchange, their usability is often deficient, even being a key factor for a website success. Usability problems repeat across websites, and many of them have been catalogued, but usability evaluation and repair still remains expensive. There are efforts from both the academy and industry to automate usability testing or to provide automatic statistics, but they rarely offer concrete solutions. These solutions appear as guidelines or patterns that developers can follow manually. This paper presents Kobold, a tool that detects usability problems from real user interaction (UI) events and repairs them automatically when possible, at least suggesting concrete solutions. By using the refactoring technique and its associated concept of bad smell, Kobold mines UI events to detect usability smells and applies usability refactorings on the client to correct them. The purpose of Kobold is to deliver usability advice and solutions as a service (SaaS) for developers, allowing them to respond to feedback of the real use of their applications and improve usability incrementally, even when there are no usability experts on the team. Kobold is available at: http://autorefactoring.lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar.