TESY: A Usability Test-Driven Prototyping Assistant Connecting Designers with Crowd-Testers
Felix Kretzer, Alexander Maedche · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025
In recent years, the availability of easy-to-use prototyping tools has empowered designers to create GUI designs. In parallel, a broad spectrum of usability testing tools have been proposed to support the collection of quantitative test data from crowd-testers. However, test specification and results are typically disconnected from created GUI designs and, therefore, difficult to translate into improvements. In this paper, we present TESY, a prototyping assistant integrating usability test specification and resulting test data. We implement TESY as a plug-in in the prototyping tool Figma. In a controlled lab study, we compare how 34 untrained designers create prototypes, specify usability tests, and improve the prototypes using the collected test data with and without TESY. We contribute by demonstrating how TESY empowers untrained designers to create enhanced GUI designs following a usability test-driven prototyping approach. Specifically, we demonstrate how TESY's capability of tightly integrating test data provided by crowd-testers into the prototyping tool leads to more data-driven and task-focused design improvements.