While Web applications have become pervasive in today's business, social interaction and information exchange, their usability is often deficient, even being a key factor for a website success. Usability problems repeat across websites, and many of them have been catalogued, but usability evaluation and repair still remains expensive. There are efforts from both the academy and industry to automate usability testing or to provide automatic statistics, but they rarely offer concrete solutions. These solutions appear as guidelines or patterns that developers can follow manually. This paper presents Kobold, a tool that detects usability problems from real user interaction (UI) events and repairs them automatically when possible, at least suggesting concrete solutions. By using the refactoring technique and its associated concept of bad smell, Kobold mines UI events to detect usability smells and applies usability refactorings on the client to correct them. The purpose of Kobold is to deliver usability advice and solutions as a service (SaaS) for developers, allowing them to respond to feedback of the real use of their applications and improve usability incrementally, even when there are no usability experts on the team. Kobold is available at: http://autorefactoring.lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar. A screencast is available at https://youtu.be/c-myYPMUh0Q
[1]
Vagner Figuerêdo de Santana,et al.
WELFIT: A remote evaluation tool for identifying Web usage patterns through client-side logging
,
2015,
Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..
[2]
Jared M. Spool,et al.
Web Form Design : Filling in The Blanks
,
2012
.
[3]
Jean Vanderdonckt,et al.
State of the Art of Web Usability Guidelines
,
2005
.
[4]
Silvia Mara Abrahão,et al.
Usability evaluation methods for the web: A systematic mapping study
,
2011,
Inf. Softw. Technol..
[5]
Martin Gaedke,et al.
S.O.S.: Does Your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Need Help?
,
2015,
CHI.
[6]
Gustavo Rossi,et al.
Automatic detection of usability smells in web applications
,
2017,
Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..
[7]
Moira C. Norrie,et al.
W3touch: metrics-based web page adaptation for touch
,
2013,
CHI.
[8]
Gustavo Rossi,et al.
A Crowdsourced Approach for Concern-Sensitive Integration of Information across the Web
,
2011,
J. Web Eng..
[9]
Fabio Paternò,et al.
Timelines for Mobile Web Usability Evaluation
,
2016,
AVI.
[10]
J. B. Brooke,et al.
SUS: A 'Quick and Dirty' Usability Scale
,
1996
.
[11]
Gustavo Rossi,et al.
Business processes refactoring to improve usability in E-commerce applications
,
2014,
Electron. Commer. Res..