Usability Analysis

AutoQUEST provides support for analysing the usability of a software. For this, it can be provided with recorded or manually created user sessions. AutoQUEST transforms them into task trees and analyses them for known usability problems. As an example, a user may click three buttons of a user interface always in the same order. As he has to click three buttons, this is less efficient than clicking only one button that comprises the functionality of clicking the three buttons. AutoQUEST detects this and proposes to combine the three buttons to one. The following sections provide more details.

Software Usability

Software supports its users in conducting their tasks. This is independent of the type of users. A user can be a human or another software. If a software allows its users to conduct their tasks with effectiveness, efficiency, and (in case of humans) satisfaction, it has a good usability.

As an example, you can think of the different tools of an office suite. Such usually provide a tool for writing documents and another one for creating presentation slides. With both tools, you may create a poster. Therefore, they both support conducting the same task. When doing the layout of the contents of the poster, both tools provide different mechanisms for doing so. While the tool for writing documents supports the usage of text columns and images anchored on the page, the presentation tool directly allows laying out the elements using appropriate boxes. For many users, using the second variant is much more efficient and satisfying. Therefore, the presentation tool has a better usability for creating posters with respect to the mentioned users. In addition, another tool that is directly designed for creating posters may provide an even better usability.

Usability Engineering

Usability should be considered throughout the whole software development process. For this, a broad variety of methods exists that can be used at distinct stages of the process. Most of these methods assess the state of the usability the user interfaces. They can even be used for unfinished blueprints of the user interfaces. Applying such methods in the development process is referred to as usability engineering.

Most of the methods of usability engineering rely on a proper analysis of the application context. With an increasing size of the application context, such as a larger number of different users, the analysis becomes imprecise. This causes a decrease of the achievable usability for the individual user or a group of users. Furthermore, the users that are actually using the software as well as their way of using the software may differ from the expectations of an initial user analysis. This is because users very often use software also for tasks, for which it was not implemented. As an example, many posters nowadays are created using tools for screen presentations or writing documents as poster software is either rare or expensive.

AutoQUEST and Usability Analysis

AutoQUEST analyses the usability of a software for the users that are using it. For this, it records users while using a software for their tasks. Based on this recording, AutoQUEST provides tools for usability analysis. At the first step, these tools determine a model of the usage of a software. This model is a task tree that combines the individual user interactions to logical units. Furthermore, AutoQUEST is able to determine a model of the GUI of the software. Based on both models, AutoQUEST is capable of performing a usability analysis of the software. As an example, a task tree may contain a regularly repeated list of user interactions on specific elements of the GUI. For most effective support for the user, these GUI elements should be colocated. If they are colocated can be checked using the GUI model. The outcome of AutoQUESTs usability analysis is a report indicating potential usability defects with an estimation for their severity and a detailled description.