Using keywords to support the verbalization in usability evaluation

Abstract

Usability evaluation is a group of systematic activities that should be performed by software developers in order to identify usability problems. A widely used strategy to evaluate usability is known as User Observation and aims to analyze whether the interaction capability provided by the software is appropriated or not. Techniques, such as, Verbalization is widely used to support the evaluations based on observations due to the reason that it provides data about the quality of user interaction. In order to automate the usability evaluation test and to minimize the evaluation time, we developed a tool named ErgoSV, which is based on the verbalization technique and is capable of automatically recognize words defined in a keyword list. ErgoSV also collects, analyzes and provides relevant information about the usability test, such as: a list of pronounced words, pronounced words counter, interfaces (set of screens / video) spoken at the moment of the pronunciation and the exact time moment of pronunciation. Some usability evaluations were conducted with applications from diverse domains and showed the effectiveness of utilizing keywords to perform usability evaluation based on verbalization technique.