Conception and Implementation of a Usability Problem Analysis Tool and its Comparison with another Usability Technique on the Example of a Workflow-driven Integration Environment

Abstract

The demand for good usability has become indisputable as usable products are more profitable, secure and enhance the reputation of its producing company.

For many applications abstract usability problems like "Users have problems using the online shop" are known, but bringing in concrete design improvements is hard. Thus, it would be desirable to transfer it to concrete problems like "The meaning of text field ’ID’ in form ’Payment’ is unclear". Deriving concrete redesign ideas from such a concrete problem is not that hard anymore.

The thesis provides a concept and a prototypical implementation of a tool to analyze an existing abstract usability problem to enable an analyst to submit substantiated improvement suggestions. The tool is automatically and remotely applicable. This reduces travel expenses and accelerates data collection. To evaluate the results the proven Think Aloud method is taken as reference usability technique. The Track-Analysis-Tool is applied on the example of the workflow-driven integration environment RCE. A user task representing the Abstract usability problem "Users have problems getting started with RCE" is defined. A study with 13 participants divided into two iterations is conducted.

The investigation of the results shows that the Track-Analysis-Tool reveals the same crucial usability problems as the Think Aloud method does and is particularly useful when it comes to quantifications like task completion times. The Track-Analysis-Tool lacks to gather subtle usability problems which can be detected with other techniques like the Think Aloud method.