Framework for Relative Web Usability Evaluation on Usability Features in MDD
Web usability in business applications is crucial for enhancing productivity and preventing critical user errors. One of the effective methods to enhance the usability is employment of usability features such as auto-complete and input validation. Then, s
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Abstract. Web usability in business applications is crucial for enhancing productivity and preventing critical user errors. One of the effective methods to enhance the usability is employment of usability features such as auto-complete and input validation. Then, such employment should be designed so as to conform to actual end-users. However, its evaluation forces developers to expend a lot of effort to design an application, to create its Web prototypes, to observe user operations with the prototypes, and to assess the usability of the employed usability features. In this paper, a framework is proposed for evaluating the usability depending on the employment efficiently even if the developers are nonusability-specialists. Our framework has characteristics as follows so that the developers can easily determine the usability with low creation costs. (1) Support for creating Web prototypes, observing user operations, and assessing the usability are integrated centered on a model-driven approach. (2) The usability can be evaluated relatively and quantitatively by recording user operations and analyzing the resulting logs. Keywords: Model driven development · Screen transition model · Usability evaluation · Business web application · Operability · User error protection
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Introduction
Web usability in business applications is crucial for enhancing productivity and preventing critical user errors. Efficiency and the ability to avoid user errors belongs to “Operability” and “User error protection” respectively as subcharacteristics of “Usability” [1]. One of the effective methods to enhance the usability is employment of usability features [3–5] such as auto-complete and input validation. Developers should evaluate the effectiveness of such employment in the early steps of application development because failure of the employment often causes fundamental restructuring a radical modification of the design of the interaction between the users and the application. c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved C. Bogdan et al. (Eds.): HCSE 2016/HESSD 2016, LNCS 9856, pp. 73–85, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44902-9 6
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However, the evaluation forces developers to expend a lot of effort to design an application, to create its Web prototypes, to observe user operations with the prototypes, and to assess the usability of the employed usability features. What is worse, such evaluation is often iterated many times to adjust the employment. In addition to the effort problem, the observation and assessment requires a high degree of special knowledge even though usability specialists do not often participate in the development. In this paper, a framework to improve the effort and special knowledge problems is proposed focusing on an important but limited area in the operability and user error protection. Our framework helps developers to efficiently evaluate the usability of usability features employed with low creation
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