Towards an automatic evaluation of web applications

Abstract

Evaluating the usability of computer applications using traditional laboratory-based tests is costly and time consuming. For modern Web applications, usually developed, tested and deployed in "Internet Time", this approach is simply not feasible. A more effective way to evaluate the usability of Web applications consists in gathering information from the user's interactions and automatically processing this data in order to detect usability problems in the execution of predefined tasks. The reported solutions based on this approach usually fail on providing efficient tools for the definition of tasks, specially in large and dynamic Web applications. In order to tackle this problem, we developed USABILICS, a system targeted for the automatic remote evaluation of usability based on an interface model. The proposed model allows the definition of tasks using a simple and intuitive approach, which can be applied to large and dynamic Web applications. USABILICS analyzes the execution of tasks by calculating the similarity among sequence of events produced by users and those previously captured by evaluators. Based on this analysis, USABILICS provides an usability index, as well as recommendations for solving usability problems detected on the execution of each task.

RUM++: A Log Mining Approach to Classify Users Based on Data Profile

“…Therefore, RUM provides two main services to the application developer: (i) task analysis and (ii) usage patterns detection. The first one exploits previous work on usability evaluation [18]. The Task Analysis module evaluates the execution of tasks by calculating the similarity among the sequence of events produced by users and those previously defined by the application specialist.…”

S.O.S.

“…Today, there are numerous approaches to interaction-based usability evaluation, such as [3,8,9] or the commercial tool m-pathy 5 . All of these try to infer usability / user experience issues from user's behavior on a website.…”

“…All of these try to infer usability / user experience issues from user's behavior on a website. This is partly done by visualizing interactions ( [3], m-pathy) and partly by comparing users' logs to pre-defined optimal logs for a given task ( [8,9]). However, the above approaches still require manual inspection of the results by developers or experts.…”

“…Although existing work (e.g., [3,8,9]) already builds on user interaction analysis for better efficiency, WaPPU is the first approach to perform A/B tests based on seven usability factors as the target metrics (e.g., readability = -0.5 for Interface A). These metrics are based on a questionnaire as well as real users' interactions with the interface.…”

Leveraging task-based data to support functional testing of web applications

“…As a result of this research, we developed USABILICS, a task-based system that performs the automatic remote evaluation of usability in web applications [16]. USABILICS evaluates the execution of tasks by calculating the similarity among the sequence of events produced by users and those previously captured by evaluators.…”