UEMan: A Tool to Manage User Evaluation in Development Environments

One of the challenges in software development is to collect and analyze the end users' feedback in an effective and efficient manner. In this paper we present a tool to manage user evaluation alongside the process of software development. The tool is based on the idea that user evaluation should be managed iteratively from within the integrated development environment (IDE) in order to provide high quality user interface. The main capabilities include creating the experiment object as part of the software project; deriving development tasks from the analysis of evaluation data; and tracing these tasks to and from the code. Further, we provide a library to enable development of Java aspects for creation of automatic measures to increase the body of the evaluation data. Using this tool, development teams can manage user-centered design (UCD) activities at the IDE level, hence developing software products with an adequate level of usability. © 2009 IEEE

A dynamic framework for multi-view task modeling

We propose a dynamic way to model task structures from multi viewpoints at different abstraction levels. For this, we provide a multi-view task modeling framework that defines a two-layered approach: at conceptual-level specific framework concepts for providing a conceptual foundation to model and structure tasks at different abstraction levels; and at representation-level through a formal task modeling language. The motivation behind this is decoupling the complexity of the underlying system behavior and business logic, and giving a comprehensive picture from all perspectives. The framework concepts and the language are customizable and extendible, thus enabling the framework to be used for creating task models for different purposes, from system analysis to performing usability evaluation. We provide details of a case study in which we successfully used the framework for conducting task model-based usability evaluation. © 2011 ACM

A Three-Fold Integration Framework to Incorporate User-Centered Design into Agile Software Development

We present a framework that incorporates user-centered design (UCD) philosophy into agile software development through a three-fold integration approach: at the process life-cycle level for the selection and application of appropriate UCD methods and techniques in the right places at the right times; at the iteration level for integrating UCD concepts, roles, and activities during each agile development iteration planning; and at the development-environment level for managing and automating the sets of UCD activities through automated tools support. We also present two automated tools-UEMan and TaMUlator, which provide the realization of the development-environment level integration

Eclipse Plug-in to Manage User Centered Design

User-centered design (UCD) approach guides the design of user interface (UI) and its evaluation by integrating user experience as part of the software development process. Involving users during the development process by applying UCD techniques minimizes risks and increases the product quality. One of the challenges towards this is to automating the management of UCD activities during the development time thus to steer and control the UCD activities within the development environment of software projects. In this paper, we present a plug-in for Eclipse development platform to manage UCD activities at the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) level. We develop and evaluate the plug-in with teams that work according to the agile software development approach. Using this plug-in, the development teams can manage UCD activities at IDE level hence developing high quality software products with adequate level of usability

A model-based approach to ongoing product evaluation

Evaluating interface usability and system functionality is time-consuming and effort-intense. The short time-span involved in development iterations, such as those in agile development, makes it challenging for software teams to perform ongoing interface usability evaluation and system functionality testing. We propose a way to perform product ongoing evaluation, thus enabling software teams to perform interface usability evaluation alongside automated system functionality testing. We use formal task models, created in our defined TaMoGolog task modeling language, to conduct product evaluation experiments through TaMUlator. TaMUlator is a tool we developed for use at the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) level. Our case study revealed that software teams can easily engage in system evaluation by using TaMUlator on an iterative basis. © 2012 ACM

Foreword

Usability and accessibility issues are common causes why software fails to meet user requirements. However, requirements engineers still focus on functional requirements and might ignore to also elicit system usability and accessibility requirements. Improving the usability and accessibility of a system in a later development stage is costly and time consuming. © 2012 IEEE