Improving the Design of a User Interface Through Automated Usability Checks

Software engineers usually do not have enough knowledge in the area of usability to develop user interfaces with a high degree of usability on their own. An initial study with 20 software engineers showed that, although usability is an important aspect for software engineers, they only spend an average of 18.14 h per project on usability-related tasks. An integrated software support solution that incorporates relevant usability knowledge would be extremely useful. Based on an analysis, a plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio has been developed. The plug-in automatically checks usability aspects of a user interface in the background. Usability-related knowledge is stored in an ontology and accessed by the plug-in during runtime. The plug-in has been evaluated with 19 software engineers. The results are mostly positive. Users find that the plug-in is useful and supports their daily engineering work by helping them to quickly enhance the usability of their software solution.