Abstract

Adaptive applications have the potential to help users with special and specific needs. However, evaluating the usability of such adaptive applications tends to become very complex. This chapter presents an integrated concept for the automated usability evaluation of model-based adaptive user interfaces. The approach is supposed to be used complementary to custom usability evaluations at an early stage of development. Interaction of a user is simulated and evaluated by combining a user model with user interface models from a model-based development framework, which is capable of providing different adaptation alternatives based on user attributes and the context of use. The main benefit of the approach is that no additional descriptions of the application’s UI and tasks need to be created for the usability evaluation because they are already available from the development process. As a result, different design alternatives and adaptation variants can be compared under equal usability evaluation criteria. Further, the complexity and costs for applying automated usability evaluation to adaptive user interfaces for users with special and specific needs can be reduced.

@incollection{
year={2013},
isbn={978-1-4471-4777-0},
booktitle={User Modeling and Adaptation for Daily Routines},
series={Human–Computer Interaction Series},
editor={Martín, Estefanía and Haya, Pablo A. and Carro, Rosa M.},
doi={10.1007/978-1-4471-4778-7_9},
title={Automated Usability Evaluation of Model-Based Adaptive User Interfaces for Users with Special and Specific Needs by Simulating User Interaction},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4778-7_9},
publisher={Springer London},
author={Quade, Michael and Lehmann, Grzegorz and Engelbrecht, Klaus-Peter and Roscher, Dirk and Albayrak, Sahin},
pages={219-247},
language={English}
}