A study on immediate automatic usability evaluation of web application user interfaces

Abstract

More and more web applications are being migrated from desktop platforms to mobile platforms. User experience is extremely different on desktop and portable devices. Changes in user interfaces (UI) could lead to severe violations of usability rules, e.g. changing the text color could lead to decrease of accessibility for users with low vision or cognitive impairments. Manual usability inspection methods are the approaches that help to verify the usability conformance to guidelines. Nevertheless, there are number of difficulties why the aforementioned approaches could not be always applied. The purpose of our research is to develop a conceptual model and corresponding framework including category specific metrics with methodology for immediate automatic usability evaluation of web application user interfaces during design and implementation phase. We address the gap between usability evaluation and development stage of user interface by providing immediate feedback to UI developers.