G. Al-Qaimari (UAE) and D. McRosstie (Australia)
CAUsE Tools, Usability Evaluation, CognitiveWalkthrough, GOMS.518-053
In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a Computer Aided Usability Engineering (CAUsE) tool built to automate many of the tedious and time consuming aspects of empirical usability testing. The tool presented, called KALDI, is tightly integrated with the Java graphical toolkit and uses only software techniques to record precise user actions as well as to capture a video-like recording of the user interface being tested. It also allows for the detailed analysis of the recorded user actions through the use of a sophisticated visualization of data. The KALDI tool has many advantages over other techniques; including the ability to conduct tests without using specialized equipment, visually represent user actions at different levels of detail, record user performances from remote locations, perform automatic classification of abstract event data into user actions and the synchronized display of video-like playback with an indication of the corresponding recorded action/event. Furthermore, we propose in this paper that integrating this class of CAUsE tool in future graphical toolkits and User Interface Management Systems (UIMS) provide many benefits to software designers and usability specialists. These benefits include helping to encourage usability testing throughout the development lifecycle, as well as providing a basis for interactive system designers and usability specialists to make sound design decisions more efficiently.
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