Evaluation tools through user participation techniques: Features, limitations, and new perspectives

The evaluation of user interfaces is a rich theme in terms of concepts, approaches, and tools. The related tools are numerous that they are mainly classified into two categories. The first one includes the tools based on expert analysis techniques. These tools require a designer and/or an evaluator during the evaluation process. The second category issued tools require user participation in the evaluation process. In this article, we focus on the second category related tools. These tools are so numerous that we estimate that it is interesting to study them. They are based on user action data capture, study, and analysis in order to evaluate user interfaces. This paper aims at drawing up the features, the limitations, and the perspectives of existing user interface evaluation tools based on user participation techniques.