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A Web Usability Evaluation Process for Model-Driven
Web Development
Adrian Fernandez, Silvia Abrahão, and Emilio Insfran
ISSI Research Group, Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación,
Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera, s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain
{afernandez,einsfran,sabrahao}@dsic.upv.es
Abstract.
Most of usability evaluation methods for the Web domain have sev-
eral limitations such as: the concept of usability is only partially supported; us-
ability evaluations are mainly performed when the Web application has been
completed; there is a lack of guidelines on how to properly integrate usability
into Web development. This paper addresses these issues through the presenta-
tion of a Web Usability Evaluation Process (WUEP) for integrating usability
evaluations at different stages of model-driven Web development processes. A
case study was performed in order to analyze the feasibility of the approach by
applying WUEP to evaluate the usability of a real Web application that was de-
veloped by using a specific model-driven development process in the industrial
domain. The results suggest that WUEP provides good insights into the per-
formance of usability evaluations. The usability problems are corrected at the
model and model-transformation levels, thereby improving the usability of the
final Web application.
Keywords:
Web Usability, Evaluation Process, Web Metrics, Model-Driven
Web Development.
1 Introduction
Usability is considered to be one of the most important quality factors for Web appli-
cations, along with others such as reliability and security [23]. It is not sufficient to
satisfy the functional requirements of a Web application in order to ensure its success.
The ease or difficulty experienced by users of these Web applications is largely
responsible for determining their success or failure. Usability evaluations and tech-
nologies that support the usability design process have therefore become critical in
ensuring the success of Web applications [20].
The challenge of developing more usable Web applications has promoted the emer-
gence of a large number of usability evaluation methods. However, most of these
methods only consider usability evaluations during the last stages of the Web devel-
opment process. Works such as Juristo
et al.
[17] claim that usability evaluations
should also be performed during the early stages of the Web development process in
order to improve user experience and decrease maintenance costs.
This is in line with the results of a systematic mapping study that we performed to
investigate which usability evaluation methods have been used to evaluate Web
