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the employment of operationalized metrics and by developing a tool that automates a
large part of the evaluation process.
Limitations of the Study.
Since the aim of the case study was to show the feasibility
of applying WUEP in an MDWD process in industrial contexts, we selected a real
Web application that was under development by a company, and we focused princi-
pally on the first four stages of WUEP. However, this case study presents some limi-
tations, such as the fact that only one type of Web application was considered since
the company imposed certain restrictions. Although the usability attributes to be
evaluated were selected through the consensus of the evaluation designers and the two
independent Web usability experts, they might not have been very representative. In
order to overcome such limitations it is necessary to determine which usability attrib-
utes are most relevant for each family of Web applications by considering several
opinions from Web usability experts.
5 Conclusions and Further Work
This paper presents the Web Usability Evaluation Process (WUEP) as a usability
inspection method that integrates usability evaluations during several stages of
Model-Driven Web Development (MDWD) processes. WUEP provides broad support
to the concept of usability since its underlying Web Usability Model has been ex-
tended and adapted to the Web domain by considering the new ISO 25000 series of
standards (SQuaRE), along with several usability guidelines. The explicit definition
of the activities and artifacts of WUEP also provides evaluators with more guidance
and offers the possibility of automating (at least to some extent) several activities in
the evaluation process by means of a process automation tool.
We believe that the inherent features of MDWD processes (e.g., traceability be-
tween models by means of model transformations) provide a suitable environment for
performing usability evaluations. The integration of WUEP into these environments is
thus based on the evaluation of artifacts, particularly intermediate artifacts (models),
at several abstraction levels from different MDWD processes. The evaluation of these
models (by considering the traceability among them) allows the source of the usabil-
ity problem to be discovered and facilitates the provision of recommendations to
correct these problems during the earlier stages of the Web development process. This
signifies that if the usability of an automatically generated user interface can be as-
sessed, the usability of any future user interface produced by MDWD processes could
be predicted. In other words, we are referring to a user interface that can be usable by
construction [1], at least to some extent. Usability can thus be taken into consideration
throughout the entire Web development process. This enables better quality Web
applications to be developed, thereby reducing effort at the maintenance stage.
In the future we intend to do the following: to analyze different proposals concern-
ing the inclusion of aggregation mechanisms to merge values from metrics in order to
provide scores for usability attributes that will allow different Web applications from
the same family to be compared; to determine the most relevant usability attributes for
different families of Web applications according to Web domain experts in order to
provide pre-defined selections of operationalized metrics; to apply WUEP to different
MDWD processes; to evaluate different types of Web applications such as Web
