UEMan: A tool to manage user evaluation in development environments

Abstract

One of the challenges in software development is to collect and analyze the end users' feedback in an effective and efficient manner. In this paper we present a tool to manage user evaluation alongside the process of software development. The tool is based on the idea that user evaluation should be managed iteratively from within the integrated development environment (IDE) in order to provide high quality user interface. The main capabilities include creating the experiment object as part of the software project; deriving development tasks from the analysis of evaluation data; and tracing these tasks to and from the code. Further, we provide a library to enable development of Java aspects for creation of automatic measures to increase the body of the evaluation data. Using this tool, development teams can manage user-centered design (UCD) activities at the IDE level, hence developing software products with an adequate level of usability. © 2009 IEEE.