A Usability Evaluation Method Based on the Lostness of Unit Action for Coding Education Software

In this paper, we first point out the limitation of the existing methods in usability evaluation, and propose a new method to find tasks and users that can cause problems in the use of software applications. To deal with object-based applications, we define unit actions and divide a given task into the sequence of unit actions. Then, we propose a new measure to calculate the degree of lostness for the unit actions. In several experiments, we show the proposed method can represent the usability well while the previous method has a problem in object-based applications. We also find that the user`s evaluation is more related to the proposed method than the previous method based on execution time through correlation analysis.