Adrian Fernandez

A Systematic Review of Usability Evaluation in Web Development

The challenge of developing more usable Web applications has motivated the appearance of a number of techniques, methods and tools to address Web usability issues. Although there are many proposals for supporting the development of usable Web applications, many developers are not aware of them and many organizations do not properly apply them. This paper reports on a systematic review of the use of usability evaluation methods in Web development. The objective of the review is to investigate what usability evaluation methods have been employed by researchers to evaluate Web artifacts and how they were employed. A total of 51 research papers have been reviewed from an initial set of 410 papers. The results show that 45% of the papers reviewed reported the use of evaluation methods specifically crafted for the Web and that the most employed method is user testing. In addition, the results of the review have identified several research gaps. Specifically, 80% of the evaluations are still performed at the implementation phase of Web applications development and 47% of the papers did not present any validation of the usability evaluation method(s) employed.

Integrating a Usability Model into Model-Driven Web Development Processes

Usability evaluations should start early in the Web development process and occur repeatedly throughout all stages to ensure the quality of the Web application, not just when the product is completed. This paper presents a Web Usability Model, which is aligned with the SQuaRE standard, to evaluate usability at several stages of a Web development process that follows a Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach. The Web Usability Model is generic and must be operationalized into a concrete MDD method by specifying the relationships between the usability attributes of the Usability Model and the modeling primitives of the specific Web development method. To illustrate the feasibility of the approach, we present a case study where the Usability Model has been applied in the evaluation of the models that are produced during the Web application development process.

Towards to the validation of a usability evaluation method for model-driven web development

The challenge of developing more usable Web applications has promoted the emergence of several usability evaluation methods. However, there is a lack of empirically validated methods that can properly be integrated during the early stages of Web development processes. This has motivated us to propose a Web Usability Evaluation Method (WUEP) which can be integrated into model-driven Web development processes. This paper presents the first steps in the empirical validation of WUEP through a controlled experiment. This experiment was designed in order to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, and satisfaction with WUEP in comparison to a widely-used inspection method: Heuristic evaluation (HE). Results show that WUEP is more effective and efficient than HE in the detection of usability problems in artifacts obtained from a model-driven Web development process. The evaluators were also satisfied when applying WUEP, and found it easier to use than HE.

A web usability evaluation process for model-driven web development

Most of usability evaluation methods for the Web domain have several limitations such as: the concept of usability is only partially supported; usability evaluations are mainly performed when the Web application has been completed; there is a lack of guidelines on how to properly integrate usability into Web development. This paper addresses these issues through the presentation of a Web Usability Evaluation Process (WUEP) for integrating usability evaluations at different stages of model-driven Web development processes. A case study was performed in order to analyze the feasibility of the approach by applying WUEP to evaluate the usability of a real Web application that was developed by using a specific model-driven development process in the industrial domain. The results suggest that WUEP provides good insights into the performance of usability evaluations. The usability problems are corrected at the model and model-transformation levels, thereby improving the usability of the final Web application.

A systematic review on the effectiveness of web usability evaluation methods

Usability evaluation methods have become critical in the Web domain to ensure the success of Web applications. Aim: Since a large number of proposals have been presented during the last few years, a question arises: Which usability evaluation methods have proven to be the most effective in the Web domain? Method: This paper presents a systematic review that was motivated by previous results obtained from a systematic mapping study in the Web usability evaluation field. Results: A total of 18 studies were selected from an initial set of 206 in order to extract, code, and synthesize empirical data concerning the effectiveness of usability evaluation methods for the Web. Conclusions: We detected a need of more empirical studies and more standardized effectiveness measures for comparing usability evaluation methods. Our results suggest several evaluation methods which may be useful in allowing researchers and practitioners to perform effective Web usability evaluations.

Further analysis on the validation of a usability inspection method for model-driven web development

Currently, there is a lack of empirically validated usability evaluation methods that can properly be integrated during the early stages of Web development processes. This has motivated us to propose a usability inspection method called WUEP that can be integrated into different model-driven Web development processes. In previous work, we presented the operationalization and validation of WUEP in a specific process based on the Object-Oriented Hypermedia (OO-H) method. In this paper, we present further analysis of the empirical validation of the operationalization of WUEP into WebML, which is one of the most well-known industrial model-driven Web development process. The effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, and satisfaction of WUEP was evaluated in comparison to Heuristic Evaluation. The results show that WUEP is more effective and efficient than heuristic evaluation in the detection of usability problems. The inspectors were also satisfied when applying WUEP, and found it easier to use than heuristic evaluation.

Usability Inspection in Model-Driven Web Development: Empirical Validation in WebML

There is a lack of empirically validated usability evaluation methods that can be applied to models in model-driven Web development. Evaluation of these models allows an early detection of usability problems perceived by the end-user. This motivated us to propose WUEP, a usability inspection method which can be integrated into different model-driven Web development processes. We previously demonstrated how WUEP can effectively be used when following the Object-Oriented Hypermedia method. In order to provide evidences about WUEPs generalizability, this paper presents the operationalization and empirical validation of WUEP into another well-known method: WebML. The effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, and satisfaction of WUEP were evaluated in comparison to Heuristic Evaluation HE from the viewpoint of novice inspectors. The results show that WUEP was more effective and efficient than HE when detecting usability problems on models. Also, inspectors were satisfied when applying WUEP, and found it easier to use than HE.

Evaluating the Usability of Mashups Applications

Mashups are new-generation of Web applications aimed at reutilizing contents and services provided by third-party components. In Web applications, usability is considered one of the most important quality factors. However, usability evaluation of mashups is usually relied upon their individual components. Therefore, there is a need for specific approaches in order to evaluate the usability of mashups by considering their specific characteristics. This paper proposes a Usability Model for Mashups that can be used for evaluating the usability of mashups applications. This Usability Model decomposes the usability sub-characteristic from the ISO/IEC 25010 standard into other sub-characteristics and attributes. Finally, metrics are associated to these attributes to quantify and detect usability problems. In order to illustrate the feasibility of the approach, we present the evaluation of a mashup application using this usability model.

Quality of Web Mashups: A Systematic Mapping Study

Web mashups are a new generation of applications based on the composition of ready-to-use, heterogeneous components. They are gaining momentum thanks to their lightweight composition approach, which represents a new opportunity for companies to leverage on past investments in SOA, Web services, and public APIs. Although several studies are emerging in order to address mashup development, no systematic mapping studies have been reported on how quality issues are being addressed. This paper reports a systematic mapping study on which and how the quality of Web mashups has been addressed and how the product quality-aware approaches have been defined and validated. The aim of this study is to provide a background in which to appropriately develop future research activities. A total of 38 research papers have been included from an initial set of 187 papers. Our results provided some findings regarding how the most relevant product quality characteristics have been addressed in different artifacts and stages of the development process. They have also been useful to detect some research gaps, such as the need of more controlled experiments and more quality-aware mashup development proposals for other characteristics which being important for the Web domain have been neglected such as Usability and Reliability.

Integrating usability evaluation into model-driven video game development

The increasing complexity of video game development highlights the need of design and evaluation methods for enhancing quality and reducing time and cost. In this context, Model-Driven Development approaches seem to be very promising since a video game can be obtained by transforming platform-independent models into platform-specific models that can be in turn transformed into code. Although this approach is started to being used for video game development, there is a need for usability evaluation methods specifically tailored to this type of development process. In this paper, we present a usability inspection method that can be used along all the stages of the model-driven video game development. The method relies on a Usability Model that is aligned with the ISO/IEC 25010 (SQuaRE) standard and decomposes usability into measurable attributes and metrics specific for the video game domain.