Rapid Usability Assessment of an Enterprise Application in an Agile Environment with CogTool
Anil Shankar, Honray Lin, Hans-Frederick Brown, Colson Rice · 2015
Lab based user testing with participants quickly becomes a bottleneck for UX teams in the industry that exist in an Agile software development environment characterized by frequent release cycles and continually changing requirements. For such teams to reduce this testing time and to quickly glean usability insights we leverage human performance modeling via CogTool. Our work compares CogTool's expert user model's task time with actual user time from lab sessions in two user studies. In these two studies CogTool's task time estimates were statistically significantly lower when compared to lab based user times but the two task times were positively correlated. We leverage this correlation between CogTool task times and lab user times to build a predictive user model. Next, we apply this user model to rapidly evaluate two new designs without lab based user testing. Based on these results we provide recommendations for Agile UX teams to harness CogTool for enhancing user research efforts and thereby reduce the bottleneck of lab based user testing.