Web usability probe: A tool for supporting remote usability evaluation of web sites

Abstract

Usability evaluation of Web sites is still a difficult and time-consuming task, often performed manually. This paper presents a tool that supports remote usability evaluation of Web sites. The tool considers client-side data on user interactions and JavaScript events. In addition, it allows the definition of custom events, giving evaluators the flexibility to add specific events to be detected and considered in the evaluation. The tool supports evaluation of any Web site by exploiting a proxy-based architecture and enables the evaluator to perform a comparison between actual user behavior and an optimal sequence of actions. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.