Backtracking Events as Indicators of Usability Problems in Creation-Oriented Applications
Venue
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), vol. 19 Issue 2, July 2012 (2012)
Publication Year
2012
Authors
David Akers, Robin Jeffries, Matthew Simpson, Terry Winograd
BibTeX
Abstract
A diversity of user goals and strategies make creation-oriented applications such
as word processors or photo-editors difficult to comprehensively test. Evaluating
such applications requires testing a large pool of participants to capture the
diversity of experience, but traditional usability testing can be prohibitively
expensive. To address this problem, this article contributes a new usability
evaluation method called backtracking analysis, designed to automate the process of
detecting and characterizing usability problems in creation-oriented applications.
The key insight is that interaction breakdowns in creation-oriented applications
often manifest themselves in backtracking operations that can be automatically
logged (e.g., undo and erase operations). Backtracking analysis synchronizes these
events to contextual data such as screen capture video, helping the evaluator to
characterize specific usability problems. The results from three experiments
demonstrate that backtracking events can be effective indicators of usability
problems in creation-oriented applications, and can yield a cost-effective
alternative to traditional laboratory usability testing.
