Aug 31 - Ardito et al, A Tool to Support Usability Inspection

A Tool to Support Usability Inspection
Carmelo Ardito, Rosa Lanzilotti, Paolo Buono, Antonio Piccinno
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Bari, Italy
{ardito, lanzilotti, buono, piccinno}@di.uniba.it

AVI '06, May 23-26, 2006, Venezia, Italy.

ABSTRACT
SUIT (Systematic Usability Inspection Tool) is an Internet-based tool that supports the evaluators during the usability inspection of software applications. SUIT makes it possible to reach inspectors everywhere, guiding them in their activities. Differently from other tools that have been proposed in literature, SUIT not only supports the activities of a single evaluator, but permits to manage a team of evaluators who can perform peer reviews of their inspection works and merge their individual reports in a single document on which they agree.


Usability is a significant aspect of the overall quality of interactive applications.

Different methods can be used for evaluating the usability of interactive systems. Among them, the most commonly adopted are inspection methods that involve expert evaluators only, who inspect the application and provide judgments based on their knowledge and expertise [8]. Their main advantage is the cost saving: they “save users”, and do not require any special equipment, nor lab facilities [4] [8]. In addition, experts can detect a wide range of problems and possible faults of a complex system in a limited amount of time.
Heuristic evaluation is a popular inspection method that involves few experts inspecting the system, and evaluating the interface against a list of recognized usability principles: the heuristics. Heuristic evaluation is said a “discount usability” method; it has been shown that it has a high benefit-cost ratio [7]. It is especially valuable when time and resources are short, because skilled evaluators, without the involvement of users, can produce high quality results in a limited amount of time [5].

It is recommended to have more than one evaluator inspecting an application. Every member in the inspection team works individually and produces a problem report. Afterwards, all nsipectors in the team meet to discuss about the discovered problems, producing only one problems list.
There are already tools for supporting the first phase of this process. In general, they offer an online form that helps conducting an inspection (such as usability review or heuristic evaluation). By using an online form to identify problems and complete a checklist, inspectors can reduce the amount of editing and re-work that is required when conducting inspections. In some cases, when inspectors have completed their work, the tools automatically create a report that can be edited and completed using a word processor.
This is the case of Review Assistant [9] and CUE (Custom Usability Evaluation) [1]. MAUVE (Multi-criteria Assessment of Usability for Virtual Environments) is another tool that was developed for usability assessment of virtual environment [10]. However, such tools only support the individual work of an inspector, but do not permit to manage a team of evaluators, to merge their individual reports and to coordinate their activities.

In this paper, we present SUIT (Systematic Usability Inspection Tool), an Internet-based tool to support the inspectors performing a special type of inspection technique, which has been proposed in [6] to overcome the drawbacks of the heuristic evaluation.
SUIT makes it possible to reach inspectors everywhere, guiding them in their activities. Inspectors can perform asynchronous peer reviews of their inspection works in a discussion forum. The inspectors are coordinated by an expert inspector who has the role of manager of the whole inspection process.
SUIT can also support other inspection techniques, such as heuristic evaluation; for other inspection techniques, little adaptations would be required.

AT (Abstract Task) Inspection
In order to overcome such drawbacks and with the objective of performing a more systematic evaluation, a different inspection has been proposed as part of a methodology for usability evaluation called SUE (Systematic Usability Evaluation); as a consequence, this technique has been called SUE inspection [6]. It exploits a set of evaluation patterns, called Abstract Tasks (ATs), which guide the inspector’s activities, precisely describing which objects of the application to look for and which actions to perform during the inspection in order to analyze such objects.
In this way, even less experienced evaluators are able to achieve more complete and precise results. ATs are formulated by means of a template providing a consistent format [6].
During the inspection, evaluators analyze the application by using the available ATs and producing a report in which the discovered problems are described.
A controlled experiment, described in [2], has shown the effectiveness and efficiency of this inspection with respect to the heuristic evaluation.
The use of ATs is the very novelty of this inspection. Moreover, since it can be used independently from the overall SUE methodology, it is more appropriate to call it AT inspection.

SUIT ARCHITECTURE
Internet application with Dynamic web pages, php, Apache serve, Data in database.
Event notification by auto email.

SUIT FUNCIONALITIES
In the AT inspection, two phases are required: the preparatory phase, which is performed only once for a class of applications to be evaluated; the execution phase, which is performed for each
application to be evaluated. The execution phase is coordinated by the inspection manager, who is an expert inspector who decides the number of inspectors to be involved, selects them and
coordinates their activities, as it is better described later.

My Comments: Since my PhD research involves developing and testing of a Usability Evaluation Tool, this article is very relevant to me as a benchmark.

CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented SUIT, a web-based tool for supporting usability inspections.
The novelty of SUIT, with respect to other tools that support application inspections, is that a
team of geographically distributed evaluators is managed.
Moreover, the team of evaluators can perform peer reviews of their work and discuss among them in an Internet-based forum with no need to meet face-to-face.
The current version of SUIT provides support for both AT inspection and heuristic evaluation. SUIT may be slightly modified to support other inspection techniques, such as cognitive walkthrough or guideline-based inspections.


REFERENCES that I may want to read further in future:
[1] CUE (Custom Usability Evaluation), available through the User Centric Web site. http://www.usercentric.com/, 2005.
[2] De Angeli, A., Matera, M., Costabile, M.F., Garzotto, F., and Paolini, P. On the Advantages of a Systematic Inspection for Evaluating Hypermedia Usability, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, 15(3), 2003, 315-335.
[3] Doubleday, A., Ryan, M., Springett, M., and Sutcliffe A. A Comparison of Usability Techniques for Evaluating Design, In Proceedings of the DIS’97, Amsterdam, NL, August 18-20, 1997, ACM Press, 101-110.
[4] Jeffries, R., Miller, J., Wharton, C., and Uyeda, K. M. User Interface Evaluation in the Real Word: a Comparison of Four Techniques, In Proceedings of the ACM CHI 91 Human Factors in Computing Systems, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 28 - June 5, 1991, 119-124.
[5] Kantner, L., and Rosenbaum, S. Usability Studies of WWW Sites: Heuristics Evaluation vs. Laboratory Testing, In Proceedings of the SIGDOC ’97, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, October 19-22, 1997, ACM Press, 153-160.
[6] Matera, M., Costabile, M.F., Garzotto, F., and Paolini, P. SUE Inspection: an Effective Method for Systematic Usability Evaluation of Hypermedia, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics- Part A, 32(1), 2002, 93-103.
[7] Nielsen, J. Usability Engineering, Academic Press. Cambridge, MA, 1993.