Automatic Method of Generating a Web Prototype Employing Live Interactive Widget to Validate Functional Usability Requirements

Usability is one of the crucial quality characteristics of Web applications. It depends strongly on users' subjective evaluation as a result of operating an application. Prototypes employing functions for enhancing usability are therefore needed so that users can validate the functions based on their subjectivity at an early stage of software development. Furthermore, the prototypes need to be refined iteratively because of frequent requirement changes caused by users' uncertainty. As a result, manual prototyping is time consuming because of the function implementation and iteration required. However, no method exists for automatically generating a prototype that employs the functions. In this paper, we propose a method of modeling the functions in UML such that the resulting model can be integrated with an existing screen transition model. A method for automatically generating the prototype from the models also is proposed. Evaluation results show that our method was useful for modeling and eliciting usability requirements.