An Integrated Environment to Design and Evaluate Web Interfaces

Abstract

The advantage of many web publishing tools is the flexibility for the user to arrange the available widgets and modules. Nevertheless, the freedom to insert and arrange components in the creation of web pages sometimes leads the designer to make usability and/or accessibility mistakes that emerge only after the interface has been built and subjected to automatic, semi-automatic or manual evaluation processes. Several systems include features to perform accessibility controls of the web sites implemented, analyzing syntactic properties rather that provide guidelines to control the usability metrics. In this work, we propose a methodology to develop web interfaces that integrates the advantages of a top–down approach to implement HTML pages with functionalities to perform usability controls analyzing an abstraction level of formal specification based upon Symbol-Relation Action grammars (SR-Action grammars, for short) (Cassino and Tucci, Information Systems: People, Organizations, Institutions, and Technologies, 2009). In particular, the visual models adopted to develop both the static characteristics and the interactive tasks of the web application, makes more intuitive the design and the development. Again, a SR-Action grammar defining the scenes of the implemented site is used to control a subset of the Nielsen heuristics at abstraction level: completeness, correctness, aesthetic and minimalist design, user control, consistency, and metrics desirable in an interactive visual interface. The analysis at formal level and the report of the usability controls allow the designer to run feedback reviews of the visual environment under consideration and to perform usability evaluation before of the canonical testing techniques. Then, we describe an implementation prototype of the development environment born of the integration of two systems previously realized: TAGIVE (Cassino et al., WSEAS Trans Inform Sci Appl J, 2006) and VALUTA (Cassino and Tucci, Information Systems: People, Organizations, Institutions, and Technologies, 2009).