Kobold: Usability as a Service through Client-Side Interaction Refactorings

Abstract

Web applications have become fundamental tools for our daily tasks, business, social interaction and information exchange in general, but poor usability continues to be a frequent problem with them. Many of these problems have been catalogued, but their systematic evaluation and repair remains costly. From both academia and industry, efforts have emerged to automate usability tests or present statistics, but they often do not consider possible solutions to the problems found. Where solutions are shown, they are usually in the form of guidelines or patterns that can be applied manually. In this paper we present Kobold, a service that detects usability problems by capturing interaction events, and offers solutions to fix them automatically when possible, or at least suggest concrete solutions. In addition, it allows the generation of different versions of the web interface, each with a set of refactorings, so that tests can be performed before applying the changes, taking advantage of the production infrastructure of the analysed application without the need to create test environments. Kobold uses the refactoring technique and the concept of bad smells, which facilitates the recognition of problems and solutions even for those with little knowledge in usability.