Mapping of usability guidelines onto user's temporal viewpoint matrix

Abstract

There are many sets of usability guidelines that could be used to quantitatively evaluate products or systems. There were, however, no quantitative means so far to evaluate a set of usability guidelines by comparing with another set of usability guidelines of an established reputation. In this paper, a new evaluation method of usability guidelines is introduced and verified as an applicable evaluation method to all kinds of usability guidelines. Our method has characteristics of employing two temporal scales, forming a user's temporal viewpoint matrix with a scale of utilization timeline and a scale of applied principles, as the means of improving the comparison accuracy. By comparing the graph patterns for each scale, we can provide a means of qualitative evaluation of the targeted guidelines; by comparing the computed similarity value of user's temporal viewpoint matrix, we can provide a means of quantitative evaluation of the targeted guidelines. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.