Automated, guideline-oriented usability evaluation of interactive systems

Abstract The observance of numerous usability guidelines during system development is tedious and error prone, and yet has largely to be performed manually. In this paper we therefore present a specialized expert tool, which takes care of this task. It significantly disburdens the developer during the system design process from the bookkeeping of guideline prescriptions and thus guarantees a consistent and usable system design. The automatic evaluation comprises all areas of usability design, i.e. graphical user interface, wording, and dialog structure. The applicability of this evaluation tool is demonstrated using two different driver information systems as examples. It is shown, that the analytically derived results are in almost perfect agreement with empirical findings.