Automation in Usability Validation (6S1)

Avi Harel

ErgoLight Ltd.

In this article the term "usability" refers to friendliness, ease of use, ease of learning, user productivity and the system resistance to user errors. Usability validation should rely on the examination of real end users when they do their real work, rather than on GUI specification, standards or style guides. Available tools for Software Quality Assurance (SQA) do not address the issue of resolving problems that end users encounter during operation.

Automation in usability testing is required to satisfy three main needs:

• To reduce the costs of testing procedures;
• To shorten testing cycles;
• To identify severe usability problems that are difficult to detect manually.

Software tools used in usability testing should be integrated with human factors methodologies and should support full cycle application development.

ErgoLight integrates methodologies of Human Factors Engineering in software tools. ErgoLight allows QA experts to identify problems in the user interface design, in the user education and training programs, in the user documentation and in the on-line help system. The problems ErgoLight identifies are of user conceptual difficulties, using the wrong terminology, orientation problems caused by mode discrepancy and wrong response to user errors. For all problems identified, ErgoLight provides backtrack to the record of user actions. For repeated difficulties, ErgoLight provides statistics of the user wasted time, used as a measure of costs of usability deficiencies.  

The full article

ErgoLight: system design by human factors

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