The state of the art in automating usability evaluation of user interfaces

Abstract

Usability evaluation is an increasingly important part of the user interface design process. However, usability evaluation can be expensive in terms of time and human resources, and automation is therefore a promising way to augment existing approaches. This article presents an extensive survey of usability evaluation methods, organized according to a new taxonomy that emphasizes the role of automation. The survey analyzes existing techniques, identifies which aspects of usability evaluation automation are likely to be of use in future research, and suggests new ways to expand existing approaches to better support usability evaluation.

Enhancing Wikipedia Editing with WAI-ARIA

“…We decided to set up a test where the tester and users were not co-located, i.e., remote testing as defined in [12]. According to Petrie et al [16] classification, the remote testing was carried out asynchronously (i.e., the participant and the evaluator do not participate at the same time) guaranteeing participant independence (i.e., users undertake the evaluation independently).…”

The Role of Vague Categories in Semantic and Adaptive Web Interfaces

“…an hypermedia node) p : W ebP age = 1 that may be provided as a metadata item inside the HM. If we use a simple automated usability analysis approach [13] to obtain estimations of the usability of Web pages from quantitative indicators, a possible rule contributing to such inference may be the following:…”

Analysis of a new simulation approach to dialog system evaluation

“…Still, a large number of other automated usability methods exists. Ivory and Hearst (2000) categorized 132 such methods according to a taxonomy and showed that these approaches typically automate only some part of the evaluation process (capture, analysis or critique), and are often specific to a narrow class of systems (such as web pages). Speech-based interfaces are not mentioned in their review, however, in recent years, several publications have appeared concerning user simulation techniques for SDSs.…”