Williamson Silva

Integrating the Usability into the Software Development Process

With the increasing use of interactive applications, there is a need for a development with better quality and a good interaction that facilitates the use for end users, because such applications are increasingly present in daily life. Therefore, it is necessary to include usability, which is one of the important quality attributes, in the development process for obtaining good acceptance rates and, consequently, improving the quality of these applications. In this paper we present a Systematic Mapping Study (SM) that assists categorizing and summarizing technologies that have been used in order to improve usability. The results from our SM show some technologies that can help improving usability in various applications. Also, it identifies gaps that still need to be researched. We found that most technologies have been proposed for the Testing phase (67.28%) and that Web applications are the most evaluated type of application (52.65%). We also identified that few technologies assist designers improving usability in the early stages of the development process (13.50% Analysis phase and 15.95% Design phase). The results from this SM allow observing the state of the art regarding technologies that can be integrated into the development process, aimed at improving the usability of interactive applications.

An Empirical Study to Evaluate the Feasibility of a UX and Usability Inspection Technique for Mobile Applications.

Usability and UX (User eXperience) are some of the most important factors for evaluating the quality of mobile applications. They focus on how easy to use an application is and the emotions that such use evokes. However, these aspects are often evaluated separately in industry through different evaluation techniques. Although it is possible to identify more usability and UX problems by employing different UX and usability evaluation methods, this distributed approach may not be cost effective and may not allow to thoroughly explore the identified issues. In order to support the identification of both UX and usability problems in a single evaluation, we have proposed Userbility, an UX and usability inspection technique that allows evaluating these aspects in mobile applications. This paper presents an empirical study over the second version of Userbility to verify its feasibility. In this study, we compared Userbility with the UX and Usability Guidelines Approach (UUGA) that helps the evaluation of usability and UX separately in mobile applications. According to the quantitative results, considering efficiency, UUGA was better than the Userbility technique. However, the qualitative results suggest that Userbility pointed more improvement suggestions, which could be useful for redesigning the evaluated application. the emotions, perceptions and judgements of an application. Therefore, software development teams willing to increase the quality in use of the developed mobile applications need to evaluate both of them. To evaluate usability and UX together, in our previous work (13), we developed Userbility in order to support inspectors in the evaluation of both UX and usability in mobile applications at the same time, to assess whether Userbility can support inspectors in detecting usability and UX problems. Nascimento et al. (13) conducted a study with five mobile applications. The results showed that it is possible to identify improvements in applications, and allowed us to identify problems during the use of the technique. Based on this, in this paper, we proposed a new version of the technique and an empirical study to evaluate the feasibility of Userbility. We have compared the Userbility to an approach proposed by De Paula et al. (5), which evaluates UX and usability separately. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II presents a background on UX and usability evaluation techniques that can be applied to evaluate mobile applications. Then, Section III shows the Userbility technique in its second version. Section IV presents the empirical study where we compared Userbility with another evaluation approach. In Section V, we present the results of the empirical study. Finally, Section VI presents our conclusions and future work.

The students' perspectives on applying design thinking for the design of mobile applications

Design Thinking (DT) is relevant for companies committed to developing a more creative and innovative application. DT provides a human-centered view of technological artifact design. Therefore, it is important to learn DT in Computer Science and Software Engineering courses as an analytic and creative process, in order to better prepare students for the software development industry. We conducted an empirical study with 17 postgraduate students in the context of mobile applications design. We used coding procedures from the Grounded Theory method for analyzing the obtained qualitative data. Based on the results, we identified some difficulties that participants experienced in using different DT techniques. The results of this study can help teachers understand the difficulties faced by students in learning DT and, consequently, help them to look for new teaching strategies for their classes. Moreover, these results can contribute to the software industry showing the competitive advantages of using DT in the design of the applications under development, especially in mobile applications.

Userbility: A Technique for the Evaluation of User Experience and Usability on Mobile Applications

User eXperience UX covers the relationship between usability, context of use, and user emotions regarding an application. Improving the UX and usability of an application, especially mobile applications, can influence their acceptance by end users. Although UX and usability evaluations focus on improving the quality of these applications, the software industry performs these evaluations separately. Based on this, we proposed Userbility, a technique for evaluating UX and usability in mobile applications. This technique is based on two methods: the Heuristic Evaluation and 3E method. In order to evaluate the Userbility technique, we conducted a study through the evaluation of five mobile applications. The results of this study show that it is possible to identify improvements in applications through a UX and usability inspection conducted with Userbility and a new version Userbility.

Designing Activity Diagrams Aiming at Achieving Usability in Interactive Applications: An Empirical Study

With the increasing use of interactive applications, it is necessary that software companies produce applications providing a good quality of use for end users. It is important to assist designers in elaborating of design models, aiming at achieving usability of the interactive applications. We proposed a technique, called UDRT-AD Usability Design Reading Technique for Activity Diagrams that helps designers in modeling Activity Diagrams aiming at achieving usability in interactive applications. The goal of this paper is to present an empirical study carried out to verify the feasibility of using the UDRT-AD technique. The analysis of the results showed that the UDRT-AD technique could be employed to help in both creating the activity diagrams and early prevention of usability problems. Furthermore, we identified some issues that need to be improved in the UDRT-AD technique to further facilitate its use for industry.