Challenges of usability testing and automation; designing usability testing toolkit
Matti Liikala · UTUPub (University of Turku) · 2020
Usability is one of the biggest features that makes a product. If the product isn’t usable it isn’t used. The problem around usability is, that it is rather subjective part to measure. Usability depends on the user. The users and user groups vary between products and services. Usability can be determined for any user interface, but in this thesis, we focus on the software and web services. Usability can be determined by performing usability tests. Usability testing is made for the software to measure the key characteristics that affect the usability. This is often considered to be time consuming and expensive. Hiring users from different user groups always takes time and after that the analysts are left with a lot of data that needs to be analysed. These and many other reasons explain why in smaller projects the usability testing might be left out. That might have a crucial effect on the success of the product. The aim of this thesis is to dive into these problems and find solutions. The main approach is to look into testing automation and the solutions found in the field, that could be used to improve the effectiveness of the testing process. These findings will be then used to design and build a testing toolkit, that helps the test performers with the data gathering, processing of the data and the analysing part of the process. The end result is a platform for performing testing more effectively. The platform is built with scalability in mind, meaning that the platform can be expanded with different tools and scripts.