Willem-Paul Brinkman, Reinder Haakma, Don Bouwhuis. Usability Testing of Interaction Components: Taking the Message Exchange as a Measure of Usability. In Robert J. K. Jacob, Quentin Limbourg, Jean Vanderdonckt, editors, Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces IV, Proceedings of Fourth International Conference on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces, January 14-16, 2004, Funchal, Portugal. pages 157-168, Kluwer, 2004.
Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE) is concerned with the development of systems from reusable parts (components), and the development and maintenance of these parts. This study addresses the issue of usability testing in a CBSE environment, and specifically automatically measuring the usability of different components in a single system. The proposed usability measure is derived from the message exchange between components recorded in a log file. The measure was validated in an experimental evaluation. Four different prototypes of a mobile telephone were subjected to usability tests, in which 40 subjects participated. Results show that the usability of the individual components can be measured, and that they can be priorities on their potential for improvement.