Testing the Usability and Accessibility of Smart TV Applications Using an Automated Model-Based Approach

As the popularity of Smart Televisions (TVs) and interactive Smart TV applications (apps) has recently grown, the usability of these apps has become an important quality characteristic. Previous studies examined Smart TV apps from a usability perspective. However, these methods are mainly manual, and the potential of automated model-based testing methods for usability testing purposes has not yet been fully explored. In this article, we propose an approach to test the usability of Smart TV apps based on the automated generation of a Smart TV user interaction model from an existing app by a specialized automated crawler. By means of this model, defined user tasks in the Smart TV app can be evaluated automatically in terms of their feasibility and estimated user effort, which reflects the usability of the analyzed app. This analysis can be applied in the context of regular users and users with various specific needs. The findings from this model-based automated analysis approach can be used to optimize the user interface of a Smart TV app to increase its usability, accessibility, and quality.