Pinpointing usability issues using an effort based framework

Often, software developers are notified of usability issues in their code through feedback from users and Human Computer Interface (HCI) experts. Yet, in many cases, the description of the issues cannot be correlated with the actual user interface (UI) program code. In this paper, we present a novel effort-based usability model in conjunction with a framework for identifying and locating (i.e., pinpointing) software usability issues and correlating the issues with UI software code. The model is based on the notion that usability is an inverse function of effort. Another innovative aspect of this framework is its focus on learning in the process of assessing usability measurements. Physical effort is obtained and inferred from logs of manual activity (e.g., keystrokes) and eye tracking. Experimental results from this study and other studies performed show high correlation to learning theory models and strongly support the relationship of effort to usability. The underlying theory and the findings of the experiments are used to propose a framework for user interface development where the interface designers are using effort-based metrics to pinpoint usability issues in the code.