Objective Evaluation Method of Usability Using Parameters of User's Fingertip Movement

The subjective evaluation method of usability is costly and time-consuming, and is sometimes more unreliable data than objective evaluation method because of the subjective view. On the other hand, the objective evaluation method is traditionally useful and reliable, but expensive. Further, this method is often not feasible, as acquiring the operation logs of many electrical products can be difficult. To overcome current limitations, we propose an objective evaluation method of usability that is applicable to various types of interfaces, such as those of actual electrical products or reproduced interfaces on a touch screen. Our proposed method involves extracting recorded fingertip movements of users during operation via image processing and then evaluating usability based on measurable parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method was able to identify problems with usability even when the traditional objective evaluation method could not.