Abstract
Daily experiences in working with various types of computer systems show that, despite the offered functionalities, users have many difficulties, which affect their overall User eXperience (UX). The UX focus is on aesthetics, emotions and social involvement, but usability has a great influence on UX. Usability evaluation is acknowledged as a fundamental activity of the entire development process in software practices. Research in Human-Computer Interaction has proposed methods and tools to support usability evaluation. However, when performing an evaluation study, novice evaluators still have difficulties to identify usability problems and to understand their causes: they would need easier to use and possibly automated tools. This article describes four visualization techniques whose aim is to support the work of evaluators when performing usability tests to evaluate websites. Specifically, they help detect “usability smells”, i.e. hints on web pages that might present usability problems, by visualizing the paths followed by the test participants when navigating in a website to perform a test task. A user study with 15 participants compared the four techniques and revealed that the proposed visualizations have the potential to be valuable tools for novice usability evaluators. These first results should push researchers towards the development of further tools that are capable to support the detection of other types of UX smells in the evaluation of computer systems and that can be translated into common industry practices.
Highlights
AND MOTIVATION Nowadays, computer systems are widely available, but only some of them are capable to provide a positive User eXperience (UX) to people interacting with them
We opted for this approach since we believe that fully automatic tools are useful for the initial processing of the data collected during a study, but the role of evaluators is instrumental in analysing problematic web pages based on the usability smells revealed by the visualizations
This article reported how existing visualization techniques may be used with a novel valuable purpose, i.e., to support novice evaluators to detect a specific type of UX smells, namely usability smells in website navigation, during the analysis of the data collected in a test for website evaluation
Summary
AND MOTIVATION Nowadays, computer systems are widely available, but only some of them are capable to provide a positive User eXperience (UX) to people interacting with them. Four visualizations are presented that aim to support usability evaluators identifying usability smells by showing the paths followed by users that interacted with a website to execute tasks of a usability test; the optimal path to successfully complete a task (the one requiring the minimum number of actions by the user) is visualized, in order to help pointing out web pages that confuse participants and lead users to follow wrong paths We opted for this approach since we believe that fully automatic tools are useful for the initial processing of the data collected during a study, but the role of evaluators is instrumental in analysing problematic web pages based on the usability smells revealed by the visualizations.
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