KWARESMI1 – Knowledge-based Web Automated Evaluation with REconfigurable guidelineS optiMIzation

KWARESMI consists of a language, a method and a tool for expressing, structuring, and organising web usability guidelines towards automated evaluation. Traditional approaches transform natural statements of usability guidelines into lines of code in a tool that parses the HTML code of a web page and performs guidelines review. These approaches are inflexible by nature: impossible to introduce a new guideline, to modify an existing one, to select guidelines on demand before evaluation. Furthermore, there is no optimization of how guidelines can be evaluated in an efficient way: all guidelines are tested on all elements, without factoring out common parts. KWARESMI attempts to address these shortcomings by allowing evaluators to express guidelines in a higher level than simply HTML code and using them for automated usability evaluation on demand. At evaluation-time, the tool examines guidelines to be checked and elements subject to evaluation to optimize the evaluation process by identifying only checkpoints that are relevant to a particular evaluation.