Masterarbeit
Measuring UI complexity through analysis of UI Tests
Completion
2024/04
Research Area
Students
Ekaterina Pavlova
Advisers
Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Heil
Description
Automatic assessment of the user interface (UI) can give valuable insight into how attractive and usable a web applications would be for users, affecting the potential success of it reducing the effort for time-consuming and expensive user studies. Different aspects can be measured such as aesthetics, subjective and emotional perception, or complexity. UI complexity is particularly important as ti influences not only the usability of a web application but also its perceived quality for the users: highly complex user interfaces cause a high cognitive load and thus negatively affect user performance. UI complexity is also a helpful metric for split testing different user interface designs when decisions regarding improvements or design changes are needed. Existing automatic assessment methods do not take user interactions into account or require the creation of additional artifacts.
This thesis aims at assessing UI complexity of web applications based on available artifacts. It investigates assessment methods using UI tests ni combination with the corresponding web user interfaces as primary information source. To test the feasibility of this approach, the complexity results need to be systematically compared to those from traditional manual assessment ni a user study. The automatic assessment needs to be integratable ni DevOps infrastructure, e.g. as a part of a CI/CD pipeline.
The objective of this thesis is to create a solution or the combination of existing approaches tO solve the problem of automated complexity assessment of web user interfaces through analysis of UI tests as described above.This particularly includes the analysis of the state of the art of existing methods of UI complexity measurement as well as the demonstration of the solution by prototypical implementation and a suitable evaluation with a user study, comparing results quality of the study and the solution.
