PUBLICATION
Ensuring Web Interface Quality through Usability-based Split Testing
Type
Conference Paper
Year
2014
Authors
Andreas Both
Research Area
Event
14th International Conference on Web Engineering
Published in
Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE2014)
ISBN/ISSN
978-3-319-08244-8
Download
Abstract
Usability is a crucial quality aspect of web applications, as it guarantees customer satisfaction and loyalty. Yet, effective approaches to usability evaluation are only applied at very slow iteration cycles in today's industry. In contrast, conversion-based split testing seems more attractive to e-commerce companies due to its more efficient and easy-to-deploy nature. We introduce Usability-based Split Testing as an alternative to the above approaches for ensuring web interface quality, along with a corresponding tool called WaPPU. By design, our novel method yields better effectiveness than using conversions at higher efficiency than traditional evaluation methods. To achieve this, we build upon the concept of split testing but leverage user interactions for deriving quantitative metrics of usability. From these interactions, we can also learn models for predicting usability in the absence of explicit user feedback. We have applied our approach in a split test of a real-world search engine interface. Results show that we are able to effectively detect even subtle differences in usability. Moreover, WaPPU can learn usability models of reasonable prediction quality, from which we also derived interaction-based heuristics that can be instantly applied to search engine results pages.
Reference
Speicher, Maximilian; Both, Andreas; Gaedke, Martin: Ensuring Web Interface Quality through Usability-based Split Testing. Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE2014), pp. 93-110, 2014.
