skip to main content
10.1145/2695664.2695791acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessacConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

SLC: a visual cohesion metric to predict the usability of graphical user interfaces

Published: 13 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

User interfaces are evaluated through techniques that require end-users and usability experts. These techniques are costly and time consuming. Therefore, quantitative techniques such as predictive metrics can be considered an indispensable alternative to address some of user interface issues. One of these metrics is a visual cohesion metric. In order to investigate the effectiveness of visual cohesion metrics as an indicator of the usability of a user interface during the early stages of user interface development, this paper introduces the Screen Layout Cohesion (SLC) metric, which is based on aesthetic, structural, and semantic aspects of GUIs. The SLC can be used to predict the usability of user interfaces in early stages of software development. This metric is supported by a complementary tool called GUIExaminer, which provides automatic calculation of the SLC metric. Our findings provide an empirical validation of the SLC for a set of user interfaces. We found that the prediction of user interface usability with the help of the SLC matches 89.7% of the results based on the participants' evaluation of the same user interfaces.

References

[1]
Alemerien, K. and Magel, K. GUIEvaluator: A Metric-tool for Evaluating the Complexity of Graphical User Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, SEKE'14.(Vancouver, Canada, 2014), 13--18.
[2]
Sears, A. AIDE: A tool to assist in the design and evaluation of user interfaces. Interct. Syst. Res. Center, Balt. 2001. 1--19.
[3]
González, S., Montero, F. and González, P. BaLOReS: a suite of principles and metrics for graphical user interface evaluation. In Proceedings of INTERACCION '12, 13th International Conference on Interacción Persona-Ordenador, (Elche, Spain, 2012), 1--2.
[4]
Parush, A., Nadir, R., and Shtub, A. Evaluating the Layout of Graphical User Interface Screens: Validation of a Numerical Computerized Mode. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 10(4). 1998, 343--360.
[5]
Zen, M. Metric-based evaluation of graphical user interfaces: model, method, and software support. EICS '13 Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems, (New York, NY, USA, 2013), 183--186.
[6]
Ngo, D. C. L., Teo, L. S., and Byrne, J. G. Modeling Interface Aesthetics. Information Science, 15(2). 2003, 25--46.
[7]
Shazia, M., Shoaib, Shah, A., and Majeed, F., Sofware Design Quality Merics for Web Based Applications. Pakistan Journal of Science, 63(1). 1 March, 2011)
[8]
Kokol, P., Rozman, I., and Venuti, V. User interface metrics. Newsletter ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 30(4). April 1995. 36--38.
[9]
Constantine, L. L. Visual coherence and usability: a cohesion metric for assessing the quality of dialogue and screen designs. In Proceedings. Sixth Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (OZCHI'96). 24--27 Nov 1996, 115--121.
[10]
Mitrović, N., and Mena, E. Improving user interface usability using mobile agents. In Interactive Systems. Design, Specification, and Verification, Springer Berlin Heidelberg. 2003, 273--287.
[11]
Li, H. F., and Cheung, W. K. An empirical study of software metrics. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 13(6). 1987, 697--708.
[12]
Ma, Y. T., He, K. Q., Li, B., Liu, J., & Zhou, X. Y., A hybrid set of complexity metrics for large-scale object-oriented software systems. Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 25(6). 2010, 1184--1201.
[13]
Chang-Mong, L., and OK-Bae, C. Interface Design Technique Considering Visual Cohesion-Rate by Object Unit. In Proc. 12th International conference, HCI International 2007. (Beijing, China, 2007), 72--81.
[14]
Sang-Young, L. Abstract Clustering based User Interface Design. In Proc. International Conference on Convergence Technology, 2(1). 2013, 445--452.
[15]
Ted P., and Jason, M. Wordnet Similarity. Retreived August 15, 2014, http://maraca.d.umn.edu/cgi-bin/similarity/similarity.cgi.
[16]
Mueller, C. J., Komogortsev, D. E., and Feldman, L. Using designer's effort for user interface evaluation. In Proccedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, SMC 2009, (San Antonio, TX, USA, 2009), 480--485.
[17]
Rubin, J. and Chisnell, D. Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests. Indianapolis, IN, USA: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2008.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. SLC: a visual cohesion metric to predict the usability of graphical user interfaces

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SAC '15: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
      April 2015
      2418 pages
      ISBN:9781450331968
      DOI:10.1145/2695664
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 13 April 2015

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. GUI
      2. GUIExaminer
      3. evaluation
      4. metrics
      5. tools
      6. usability
      7. visual cohesion

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      SAC 2015
      Sponsor:
      SAC 2015: Symposium on Applied Computing
      April 13 - 17, 2015
      Salamanca, Spain

      Acceptance Rates

      SAC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 291 of 1,211 submissions, 24%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)15
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
      Reflects downloads up to 21 Sep 2024

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all

      View Options

      Get Access

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Media

      Figures

      Other

      Tables

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media