Assessment of Usability of Web-Based Applications' User Interfaces

Abstract

System intelligence can be expressed in terms of how much it helps to make a desired task easy for human beings. The concept can be extended to user interface of computer software which is the cornerstone of human- machine interaction. User interface is the key in determining the user experience with a given system; regardless whether the system is for an industrial control system or a website. It is very much desirable to make the user interface of a software user friendly so that the user can understand and use the software as intuitively as possible. Just as the Machine Intelligence Quotient (MIQ) is used for describing "intelligence" of a system, we would like to devise a systematic scoring system to describe the quality of user interface (UI). In this work, an objective and automated method of evaluating the user interface quality is proposed and ways of comparing against existing subjective heuristic methods are explored. A derivative of Machine Intelligence Quotient (MIQ) method, called User Interface Quotient "UIQ" is used as an objective way of evaluating user interface equality.