SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

Improving a Web Usability Inspection Technique
through an Observational Study
Priscila Fernandes, Tayana Conte
Grupo de Usabilidade e Engenharia de Software (USES)
Universidade Federal do Amazonas
Manaus, Brazil
{priscila.fernandes, tayana}@icomp.ufam.edu.br
Bruno Bonifácio
Nokia Institute of Technology - INdT
Manaus, Brazil
{bruno.bonifacio}@indt.org.br
Abstract— Given the growth in the usage of Web Applications,
the usability of these applications has become a key success
factor. Several technologies have been developed to evaluate and
improve this quality factor. However, the usability inspections
results still depend on the inspector’s experience. We have
proposed a Web usability inspection approach, called WE-QT
(Web Evaluation – Question Technique), a question based
technique that aims to reduce the difficulties of inspectors with
little knowledge of usability. We are following an
experimentation-based methodology to support its development
and improvement. This paper presents an observational study,
aimed at eliciting how inspectors apply the WE-QT technique.
We discuss the quantitative and qualitative results and their
impact on improving the WE-QT. Results indicated that our
technique assists novice inspectors uncovering usability problems
effectively; despite qualitative data indicate the need for
improvement.
Keywords – web application, usability evaluation, inspection
technique; observarional study; qualitative analysis
I. INTRODUCTION
The increasing popularity of Web applications has allowed
an intensive use of these applications in current society [1]. The
success of Web applications can be determined by two
features: their fast evolution and their usability [2]. Usability is
considered to be one of the most important quality factors for
Web applications, along with others such as reliability and
security [3].
The acceptability of Web applications relies strictly on the
usability of the applications [4]. Web applications with poor
usability will be quickly replaced by other ones more usable, as
soon as its existence becomes known to the target audience [5].
Still, users often face errors while using these applications,
caused by the not intuitive interfaces [6]. Therefore, improving
usability of Web application can substantially minimize the
users’ interaction difficulty and improve the quality of these
applications [7].
The challenge of developing Web applications with more
intuitive interface has made the usability evaluation of these
applications an important research area. Several methodologies
to ensure a good usability specific for Web applications have
been proposed, some of them based on user testing and others
based on inspections performed by experts [8]. However,
usability evaluations on Web development processes are often
avoided by developers or companies due to their lack of
experience in the field. Despite the high demand for usability
evaluations of Web applications, developing methods to assist
novice inspectors detecting defects without compromising the
inspection result is not a simple task. According to Conte et al.
[9], inspectors’ skills such as experience on usability and
inspection can affect the outcome of the inspection.
For this reason, we have proposed a new usability
inspection technique, called WE-QT (Web Evaluation
Question-Technique) [10]. The WE-QT technique was
specifically tailored for usability evaluation of Web
applications for novice evaluators. It uses a question based
approach to guide the inspectors uncovering usability
problems. The main goal of our solution is to minimize the
difficulties and efforts of software developers with little
knowledge in usability when executing inspections.
To support the development and validation of the WE-QT
technique, we adopted the experimental methodology presented
in [11]. This methodology comprises four stages: 1) feasibility
studies to determine the usage possibility of the technology; 2)
observational studies to improve the understanding of the
technology, that aims to answer the question “Do the steps of
the process make sense?”; 3) case studies in real lifecycle to
characterize the technology application during a real lifecycle,
and; 4) case studies in industry to identify if technology
application fits into the industrial setting. Following this
methodology, Fernandes et al. [10] presented an overview of
the development of our technique and the feasibility study
results, including discussions on how the methodology guided
this phase of its development.
This paper describes the conducted observational study,
aimed at eliciting how inspectors apply the WE-QT technique.
We analyzed the qualitative data using coding procedures [12].
We discuss the results of the quantitative and qualitative data
analyses and their impact in the improvement of the WE-QT
technique. The results show that our technique assists novice
inspector detecting usability defects effectively.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows:
Section 2 presents some background information on Web
usability evaluation. Section 3 pr esents our technique, as th e
results of a feasibility study aimed at improving the technique.
In Section 4, the observational study to evaluate our technique
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