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artifacts and how they were employed [12]. The study suggests several areas for fur-
ther research, such as the need for usability evaluation methods that can be applied
during the early stages of the Web development process, methods that evaluate differ-
ent usability aspects depending on the underlying definition of the usability concept,
the need for evaluation methods that provide explicit feedback or suggestions to im-
prove Web artifacts created during the process, and guidance for Web developers on
how the usability evaluation methods can properly be integrated at relevant points of a
Web development process.
The majority of Web development processes do not take advantage of the artifacts
produced at the requirements and design stages. These intermediate artifacts are prin-
cipally used to guide developers and to document the Web application. Since the
traceability between artifacts and the final Web application is not well-defined, per-
forming usability evaluations of these artifacts can be difficult. This problem is allevi-
ated in Model-Driven Web Development processes (MDWD) where intermediate
artifacts (models), which represent different views of a Web application, are used in
all the steps of the development process, and the final source code is automatically
generated from these models.
Most MDWD processes break up the Web application design into three models:
content, navigation and presentation. These dimensions allow proper levels of ab-
straction to be established [7]. An MDWD process basically transforms models that
are independent of technological implementation details (i.e., Platform-Independent
Models - PIMs) such as structural models, navigational models or abstract user
interface (UI) models into other models that contain specific aspects from a specific
technological platform (i.e., Platform-Specific Models - PSMs) such as specific UI
models, database schemas. This is done by automatically applying transformation
rules. PSMs can be automatically compiled to generate the source code of the final
Web application (Code Model - CM). This approach is followed by several methods
such as: OO-H [13] or WebML [8]. The evaluation of these models (PIMs, PSMs, and
CMs) can provide usability evaluation reports which propose changes that can be
directly reflected in the final source code.
In a previous work [11] we followed these ideas to present a Web Usability Model
that decomposes the usability concept into sub-characteristics and measurable attrib-
utes, which are then associated with Web metrics in order to quantify them. The aim
was to evaluate usability attributes in several artifacts obtained from a Web develop-
ment process that follows an MDWD approach. In this paper, we present an inspec-
tion method called Web Usability Evaluation Process (WUEP) that employs our Web
Usability Model in order to integrate usability evaluations into several stages of
MDWD processes.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses related works that report
usability evaluation processes based on inspection methods for Web development.
Section 3 presents the Web Usability Evaluation Process. Section 4 presents a real
case study that has been performed to illustrate the feasibility of WUEP. Finally,
Section 5 presents our conclusions and further work.
2 Related Work
Usability evaluation methods can be mainly classified into two groups: empirical
methods and inspection methods. Empirical methods are based on capturing and
