Automation of usability inspections for websites

Abstract

To allow website portals to be designed according to the functional needs of users, the concept of usability has gained great importance in recent years. In this sense, according to ISO 9241-11, usability focuses on fulfilling a user’s objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. At usability level in websites, a set of usability inspection heuristic tests exists, such as Torres-Burriel, which, based on a set of usability criteria and heuristics, allows identifying typical usability problems. In spite of the above, execution of these types of usability tests does not only involve the inspection and evaluation of the criteria, but also the processing and analysis of the data, given that the templates for these tests are usually found in text documents. In this paper, we propose as a contribution, a software system to inspect the usability of websites, which allows evaluating the criteria associated with the heuristics and the graphic analysis of the heuristics evaluated. This software system seeks to support developers and experts to carry out usability inspections on websites.