Maximilian Speicher

Ensuring Web Interface Quality through Usability-Based Split Testing

Usability is a crucial quality aspect of web applications, as it guarantees customer satisfaction and loyalty. Yet, effective approaches to usability evaluation are only applied at very slow iteration cycles in today’s industry. In contrast, conversion-based split testing seems more attractive to e-commerce companies due to its more efficient and easy-to-deploy nature. We introduce Usability-based Split Testing as an alternative to the above approaches for ensuring web interface quality, along with a corresponding tool called WaPPU. By design, our novel method yields better effectiveness than using conversions at higher efficiency than traditional evaluation methods. To achieve this, we build upon the concept of split testing but leverage user interactions for deriving quantitative metrics of usability. From these interactions, we can also learn models for predicting usability in the absence of explicit user feedback. We have applied our approach in a split test of a real-world search engine interface. Results show that we are able to effectively detect even subtle differences in usability. Moreover, WaPPU can learn usability models of reasonable prediction quality, from which we also derived interaction-based heuristics that can be instantly applied to search engine results pages.

S.O.S.: Does Your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Need Help?

Over the past 20 years, search engines have become emph{the} entry point of the WWW. Due to evolving needs for different and new kinds of information, the interfaces of search engine results pages (SERPs) change over time. Thus, their usability must be continuously evaluated to ensure user satisfaction and competitive edge. As no complete solution exists, we present emph{S.O.S.:} the emph{SERP Optimization Suite}. Our approach comprises (a) emph{WaPPU}, which is a near real-time tool for evaluating web interfaces based on usability scores, and (b) a emph{catalog of best practices} that maps bad scores to potential causes and corresponding adjustments for optimization. During a case study in which we assessed and optimized a real-world SERP, S.O.S. has proven its feasibility and effectiveness by significantly improving the SERPs usability.

Inuit: The Interface Usability Instrument

Explicit user testing tends to be costly and time-consuming from a company’s point of view. Therefore, it would be desirable to infer a quantitative usability score directly from implicit feedback, i.e., the interactions of users with a web interface. As a basis for this, we require an adequate usability instrument whose items form a usability score and can be meaningfully correlated with such interactions. Thus, we present Inuit, the first instrument consisting of only seven items that have the right level of abstraction to directly reflect user behavior on the client. It has been designed in a two-step process involving usability guideline reviews and expert interviews. A confirmatory factor analysis shows that our model reasonably well reflects real-world perceptions of usability.

Was That Webpage Pleasant to Use? Predicting Usability Quantitatively from Interactions

Webpage usability is crucial for customer satisfaction and loyalty. Yet, evaluations of webpages are usually tedious or do not provide sufficient information. Thus, we aim at providing a novel layout-independent framework for automatically predicting a quantitative measure of usability from user interactions. A study has shown that it is necessary to take into account differences in user intention and structural features already for very similar webpages. We propose preprocessing steps in terms of structure-based clustering and determining user intention, which will make it possible to provide meaningful usability models that support satisfaction and loyalty.

WaPPU: Usability-Based A/B Testing

Popular split testing approaches to interface optimization mostly do not give insight into users’ behavior. Thus, a new concept is required that leverages usability as a target metric for split tests. WaPPU is a tool for realizing this concept. It learns models using a minimal questionnaire and can then predict usability quantitatively based on users’ interactions. The tool has been used for evaluating a real-world interface. Results underpin the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach.

Paving the Path to Content-Centric and Device-Agnostic Web Design

Content-centric and device-agnostic design are crucial parts of modern web design. They are required to cater for the rapidly growing variety of different web-enabled devices and screen resolutions. We review satire site motherfuckingwebsite.com as a drastic example for realizing these aspects. Additional enhancements are proposed that pave the path to up-to-date minimalistic web design. A simple example application is described to illustrate the proposed approach.