Towards an Early Usability Evaluation for Web Applications

In the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community, the usual way to measure usability is through a user test. The disadvantage of this way is that the system must be implemented before performing the test. As a consequence, developers must solve the usability issues in the last stages of the development process. Currently, the model-driven software development is gaining popularity as a solution to reduce changes impact. In this paper, a usability model is proposed to evaluate early usability from the conceptual schemas that represents a Web Application. This approach allows to incorporate usability improvements before the implementation of the final web application. We evaluate the usability of artefacts modelled with OOWS, a model-driven web engineering method. In addition, two case studies are used to verify the instruments proposed to evaluate our early usability model.