Measuring User Experience of Usability Tool, Designed for Higher Educational Websites
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The user feedback is always important in order to enhance the quality of the software. Usability and user experience are the factors to be considered to improve the quality of the software. There are different methods to evaluate the usability of the software but here in this paper we are aiming to measure the user experience of software, designed for the usability evaluation of the higher educational websitesin order to enhance the usability. This will provide usinformation of the overall impact of software onend users or developers which will help us to analyze the usability level of our software.Keywords:
System usability scale
Usability goals
Cognitive walkthrough
Component-based usability testing
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Usability is now a well-established concept in software engineering resulting in a major shift in the design, development, and deployment of software applications. Moreover, the appreciation of usability, as an important aspect in managing the potentials risks caused by inappropriate outcomes of the interaction between systems and their users, is rapidly increasing. It is, nevertheless, critical for the developed software to be able to assist users in carrying out their intended tasks without unnecessary effort or frustration on the part of users. This is what usability evaluation strives to achieve. Better decisions relating to usability at any stage of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) can be captured by taking user experience into consideration. Many methods have been developed for capturing the user perspective of software, such as questionnaires, checklists, and laboratory tests. However, due to the different, rapid and competitive development of systems, the huge variety of usability definitions and evaluation types and multiple expectations from different stakeholders, evaluating software usability has become a very challenging task. Additionally, the new expansion of the techniques applicable to the evaluation of usability in recent years caused an issue amongst software development teams with choosing the right ones under different software development project’s circumstances. To many developers within software development teams, incorporating user-centred techniques for enhancing software usability remains relatively unknown, unclear, or is otherwise inaccessible, difficult or underused, especially by developers in small to medium-sized software development teams. The main hypothesis proposed by this thesis is that there exists a lack of proper managerial tools to assist developers and/or project managers within software development teams in the decision-making processes involved in the selection of appropriate usability testing tools. The focus is on particularly small- to medium-sized software development projects, where usability expertise may be more limited resulting in inappropriate implementation of usability evolution methods within software development projects. Consequently, negatively influencing the appropriate application of software usability evaluation methods and generating higher ratios of usability risks. A framework will be defined in this thesis as a solution to this problem in which a different approach to usability evaluation is proposed. It introduces a bottom-up approach to usability focusing on software projects by identifying their constraints to suggest appropriate usability evaluation techniques. The framework developed works as an enabler for bringing usability closer to software engineering by enhancing the interaction between these two disciplines particularly in small- to medium-sized software development projects. A literature review was carried out to discuss and investigate the related topics to usability definitions, usability focused software development lifecycles, usability evaluation methods (UEMs) and current techniques in selecting UEMs. Additionally, initial data to investigate the current gap between usability application in real scenarios and theories was carried out in the form of interviewing small development team members who were actively developing an application and carrying out usability evaluations. The analysis of the data contributed to designing the framework this study suggested as an approach to solving the problem. The framework then is tested and evaluated after being developed into an expert system that uses logical reasoning and fuzzy logics to produce results. However, the initial evaluation of the system suggested further implementation of risk assessment model leading to the second phase of the system development. The risk assessment model was afterwards evaluated separately. Both evaluations were conducted through incorporating several qualitative methods and analyzed thematically to ensure coherence and allow relational interpretations across the data sets gathered through different methods by recognizing common themes. Finally the thesis concludes with discussing the suggestions for future work for the tool developed and the theories of usability and its evaluations methods.
Cognitive walkthrough
Usability goals
Personal software process
System usability scale
Component-based usability testing
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Usability is critical for any system, but in software it is one of the most important features. In fact, one of the main reasons for software failure is the system lacking to achieve users specified goals and satisfaction. For this reason, usability evaluation is becoming an important part of software development. Software usability evaluation can be costly in terms of time and human. Therefore, automation is promising way to augment existing approaches especially if the evaluation is subjective where the usability concentrated about user's opinion. This paper proposes to use opinion mining as an automatic technique to evaluate subjective usability. Opinion mining is a research subtopic of data mining aiming to automatically obtain useful opinioned knowledge in subjective texts. We propose a novel model to extract knowledge from opinions to improve subjective software usability. This is the first time opinion mining used in software usability. To evaluate our proposed model, a set of experiments was designed and conducted and we got an average accuracy of 85.41%. Also, we propose to use graphics to visualize user's opinion in software and to compare the usability of two software.
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Usability goals
System usability scale
Cognitive walkthrough
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The goal of all software engineering is to construct computer systems that people find usable and will use. Usability is an overall goal that encompasses both system functionality and user interface issues. Assessing usability is vital for those acquiring software packages as well as for those designing and developing software. The concept is also worth scientific research. Still, defining or measuring usability is problematic both in the course of system development projects and in research settings. The measures promoted by some recent usability studies are inadequate and even give rise to false assumptions. The concept of usability is a difficult one since the factors affecting it are defined only in the use context. It is not possible to evaluate the usability of a computer system without tying it up with the actual activities the user wants to use the system for. This claim is supported by a series of case studies in decision support systems. These studies have clearly shown that no list of usability evaluation criteria suffices in the long run; instead, perceived usability depends heavily on (organizational) context. Still, it is an important goal in every context, not only in decision support systems.
Usability goals
Cognitive walkthrough
Component-based usability testing
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In order to develop an easy to use, effective and efficient software system that satisfies the stakeholder needs, usability attributes should be addressed and measured appropriately during all development stages. However, measuring usability is widely recognized as the most challenging task for the system development team. Such a challenge can be attributed to the absence of an existing comprehensive usability model that covers all the fuzzy usability attributes. This paper aims to elicit and analyze usability attributes from previously existing usability models for developing an integrated usability model from different practitioners' and researchers' views. The main contribution of this model is constituted in the attempt of gathering and modeling several fuzzy usability attributes in a homogeneous manner, and providing different measures for these attributes, in order to facilitate measuring them during every stage of software development. Hence, this will assist in detecting and tracing usability problems in each stage, handling them with less time, efforts, resources, and in evaluating the usability of the implemented system as well.
Cognitive walkthrough
Usability goals
System usability scale
Component-based usability testing
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Usability goals
Cognitive walkthrough
System usability scale
Component-based usability testing
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In some software development contexts, understanding 'who else' to report usability results to and how this must be done has a larger impact on the usability of products, in the long run, than reporting results to designers and developers in planned and ongoing software development projects. This situation is true in some parts of the telecommunication area. This is an area that constantly presents new usage possibilities arising from new 'hot' technology and competitive situations, i.e. not primarily from internally identified user needs. Understanding how use-oriented knowledge can have the greatest impact in this context is a challenge. As engineers we must be prepared to adjust our work to varied actors and environments under specific conditions to optimize our influence. In this case, how do the 'new hot technology and competitive situation focus' affect our possibilities to introduce use-oriented knowledge? Our desire to achieve highest leverage from performed usability work made us realize that we need to take advantage of existing usability test reporting as a first step in introducing more of user experience in the user-orientation.
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Cognitive walkthrough
Usability goals
System usability scale
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The use of a usability test laboratory for software products can directly affect products. Error messages, instructions, panel design, and system flow can all be improved when system developers are able to observe users interacting with software products, attempting to solve real-world problems with a system in the process of development. Furthermore, the use of a usability laboratory can have, in addition to this direct effect on the quality of a particular software system, can have a less direct (but perhaps more powerful) impact on procedures within the development organization. Usability testing can raise the level of human factors awareness among developers, while providing an objective arena in which programmers, writers, human factors specialists, and other support personnel can evaluate the usability of application software.
Component-based usability testing
Cognitive walkthrough
Usability goals
System usability scale
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