Usability Evaluation of User Interfaces Generated with a Model-Driven Architecture Tool

Model-driven architecture (MDA) has recently attracted the interest of both the research community and industry corporations. It specifies an automated process for developing interactive applications from high-level models to code generation. This approach can play a key role in the fields of software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI). Although there are some MDA-compliant methods for developing user interfaces, none of them explicitly integrates usability engineering with user interface engineering. This chapter addresses this issue by showing how the usability of user interfaces that are generated automatically by an industrial MDA-compliant CASE tool can be assessed. The goal is to investigate whether MDA-compliant methods improve software usability through model transformations. To accomplish this, two usability evaluations were conducted in the code model (final user interface). Results showed that the usability problems identified at this level provide valuable feedback on the improvement of platform-independent models (PIM) and platform-specific models (PSM) supporting the notion of usability produced by construction.