Inuit: Towards Live Usability Testing of Web Interfaces

Authors: Maximilian Speicher, Andreas Both (R&D, Unister GmbH), Martin Gaedke

Introduction

There are numerous instruments for measuring usability on the web. Surprisingly, none aims at live usability testing of online webpages, which is more cost-effective and less time-consuming compared to common approaches. Based on guideline reviews and expert interviews, we propose Inuit - a new usability instrument aimed at this specific purpose. A confirmatory factor analysis shows that the structure of Inuit well reflects users’ perception of web interface usability. Results also indicate that we can correlate client-side interaction patterns with Inuit’s usability factors, which is an important step towards prediction of usability from implicit data alone.

Demo

Set-up of the conducted user study with four online news articles:

• article from cern.ch
• article from cnn.com
• article from scientificamerican.com
• article from news.yahoo.com

Resources

• Considered rules from guideline reviews and mappings to factors of usability: guideline_reviews.pdf
• Data for reproducing the confirmatory factor analysis (requires SPSS Amos 20): factor_analysis.zip
• Noteworthy correlations between user interaction features and usability items: noteworthy_correlations.pdf

Acknowledgments

This work has been carried out in cooperation with Unister GmbH, Leipzig and was supported by the ESF and the Free State of Saxony.