Tagung "Mensch und Computer 2022" in Darmstadt

Objective:

The aim of the workshop is to collect, share and discuss novel approaches that support and augment the (semi-)automatic evaluation of (complex) interactive applications focusing on the user interface.

Context:

There exist many guidelines, norms, and standards on how usability can be evaluated (ISO 9241, W3C WCAG, VDI/VDE 3850, …). However, the evaluation itself is still to be executed by humans. This can be a tedious, erroneous, lengthy and expensive task. Furthermore, the results can vary depending on the executing expert. Therefore, this important stage in the development of interactive applications is often shortened or omitted altogether. Therefore, it is desirable to both support and streamline the evaluation of the usability of an application.

Content:

Augmenting and supporting the evaluation of the usability can be achieved with regard to many different channels and means, e.g.:

• Formalizing “soft” criteria (Usability knowledge) in the ISO 9241 and WCAG, e.g. suitability for the task, self-explanatory.
• Evaluating screen-recordings by way of image recognition techniques.
• Evaluating existing implementation code of an application in order to derive a formal model which in turn can be formally evaluated.
• Evaluating prototypes and assessing various properties with regard to their usability.
• Not only the usability of the ubiquitous graphical user interface can be supported, but also the usability of other means of interactions. E.g., Voice interfaces are by design tightly structured, potentially offering an easier approach to formal evaluation.
• Novel evaluation approaches for Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality user interfaces.
  
  

The support may or may not replace the human in the loop. It is expected that in most cases, humans will still have the last word when it comes to classifying and judging the results of the support. Hence a full automatization will be a topic of the future, currently we look forward to many ways of an augmentation of the evaluation process in usability engineering.

Target Audience:

Different communities and disciplines are involved in developing such a topic, both in the research and in the development practice. We expect to discuss relevant contributions from computer scientists, designers, Data and AI experts, psychologists, etc. The workshop’s goal is to set-up a heterogenous community for future information exchange.