A web system and mobile app to improve the performance of the usability testing based on metrics of the ISO/IEC 9126 and emocards

Abstract

A method traditionally used to measure the usability level of software products is the well-known usability testing. In this method, people are employed as participants and usability experts commonly use usability metrics to be able to evaluate participants as they interact with the software product from which they want to measure their level of usability. On the one hand, there is a very wide variety of metrics from the ISO/IEC 9126 standard used to measure software quality. On the other hand, the Emocards allow us to obtain user experience metrics. The traditional usability testing, the metrics of the ISO/IEC 9126 standard and the Emocards can be used together to obtain better results. However, the results of five interviews with usability experts from different contexts and nationalities, who have been part of usability testing teams, allowed identifying a series of problems that arise when performing these methods in a traditional way. Therefore, this paper aims to show the tools called UTWebSystem and UTMobileApp, which pretend to be tools of frequent use to support the usability testing process based on usability metrics and Emocards. It is proposed that these tools solve the problems detected in this research. The collaboration of 30 participants and 6 usability experts was requested in order to carry out experiments and validate the importance of these tools. The results of this study have allowed obtaining promising results that encourage considering the use of these tools.