20100922 - Ivory, ..Automated Web Interface Evaluation

An empirical foundation for automated Web interface evaluation by Ivory, Melody Yvette, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2001 , 466 pages; AAT 3044509 My Interest: (1) Automated web evaluation methodology & tools. (2) Synthesis of usability & performance evaluation. Action: Low priority to read the Dissertation in future. This dissertation explores the development of an automated Web evaluation methodology and tools. It presents an extensive survey of usability evaluation methods for Web and graphical interfaces and shows that automated evaluation is greatly underexplored, especially in the Web domain. This dissertation presents a new methodology for HCI: a synthesis of usability and performance evaluation techniques, which together build an empirical foundation for automated interface evaluation. The general approach involves: (1) identifying an exhaustive set of quantative interface measures; (2) computing measures for a large sample of rated interfaces; (3) deriving statistical models from the measures and ratings; (4) using the models to predict ratings for new interfaces; and (5) validating model predictions. Methodology – Statistical Models This dissertation presents a specific instantiation for evaluating information-centric Web sites. The methodology entails computing 157 highly-accurate, quantitative page-level and site-level measures. The measures assess many aspects of Web interfaces, including the amount of text on a page, color usage, and consistency. These measures along with expert ratings from Internet professionals are used to derive statistical models of highly-rated Web interfaces. The models are then used in the automated analysis of Web interfaces. Quantitative Measures of websites This dissertation presents analysis of quantitative measures for over 5300 Web pages and 330 sites. It describes several statistical models for distinguishing good, average, and poor pages with 93%-96% accuracy and for distinguishing sites with 68%-88% accuracy. Comments: My impression is that this Dissertation may be uninteresting to read, lots of stats talk. I don't like the Abstract..sigh. Note: Softcopy Dissertation is scanned version; hence, could not copy and paste; could not blog easily about it.