Defining expected behavior for usability testing

Abstract

Within HCI task models are widely used for development and evaluation of interactive systems. Current evaluation approaches provide support for capturing performed tasks and for analyzing them in comparison to a usability experts' captured behavior. Analyzing the amount of data works fine for the evaluation of smaller systems, but becomes cumbersome and time-consuming for larger systems. Our developed method aims at making the implicitly existing expectations of a usability expert explicit to pave the way for automatically identifying candidates for usability issues. We have enhanced a CTT-like task modeling notation with a language to express expected behavior of test users. We present tool support to graphically compose expectations and to integrate them into the usability evaluation process. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.