Enhancing the Effectiveness of Usability Evaluation by Automated Heuristic Evaluation System

Abstract

Usability defects test escapee can have a negative impact on the success of software. It is quite common for projects to have a tight timeline. For these projects, it is crucial to ensure there are effective processes in place. One way to ensure project success is to improve the manual processes of the usability inspection via automation. An automated usability tool will enable the evaluator to reduce manual processes and focus on capturing more defects in a shorter period of time. Thus improving the effectiveness of the usability inspection and minimizing defects escapee. There exist many usability testing and inspection methods. The scope of this paper is on the Heuristic Evaluation (HE) procedures automation. The Usability Management System (UMS) was developed to automate as many manual steps as possible throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). It is important for the various teams within the organization to understand the benefits of automation. The results show that with the help of automation more usability defects can be detected. Hence, enhancing the effectiveness of usability evaluation by an automated Heuristic Evaluation System is feasible.

Supporting Maintenance of Web Applications Using User-Centered Technique

“…Sivaji et al [7] proposed a new method by developing Usability Management System (UMS) in order to assist evaluators to reduce manual process and capture more defects in a shorter period. However, the evaluators have to manually report the defects with a long text description.…”

Speculative Usability

“…Automated usability tests have added momentum to this trend of limiting testers’ ability to observe the objects’ relations with anything but the user, removing any particularities of individual users from the results and analysis other than quantitative measures of their performance (Juristo, Moreno, & Sanchez-Segura, 2007; Mueller, Tamir, Oleg, & Feldman, 2009; Roder, 2012; Sivaji & Soo, 2011). Let us take as an example Beyond the Usability Lab: Conducting Large-Scale Online User Experience Studies (Albert, Tedesco, & Tullis, 2009), which discussed how to measure user behavior with the help of streamlined online interfaces.…”

Evaluation of mobile games with playability heuristic evaluation system

“…The method of conducting heuristic evaluation manually is time consuming as observed during evaluation and also reported by other usability practitioners [10]. This condition has given rise to the development of usability assessment tools and available in market [11] , [12] , [13] , [14] and [15]. However, it is also a challenging task to determine which tool is good or bad.…”