Computer-Aided Usability Evaluation : A Questionnaire Case Study

Computer-aided tools can be built to give support to different usability evaluation techniques, reducing some of their costs. These tools are complementary to existing fully automated ones, which are limited to the evaluation of external attributes. In this work, a generic model for questionnaire-based usability evaluation is described, along with the tool that implements it, which allows for fuzzy linguistic aggregation of opinions and provides support for results prediction based on similarity measures. Our tool is aimed at the exploitation of a growing database of evaluation facts with the help of various knowledge discovery and machine learning tools. Specifically, some preliminary applications of clustering and association mining techniques are described.