Quality and Potential for Adoption of Web Usability Evaluation Methods: An Empirical Study on MILE+

Web usability evaluation methods are conceptual tools which should enable web designers, web engineers and usability engineers to detect and possibly anticipate usability problems of a web application, and eventually to provide requirements for improving the quality of the user experience. As the number of techniques and methods available grows, practitioners need clear criteria to choose which methods best fit their project needs, resources and organizational goals. Therefore, it becomes more and more important to foster research towards evaluating the quality of the usability evaluation methods, especially in view of their potential adoption among practitioners. Besides focussing on known attributes of intrinsic quality of the method (such as coverage, reliability and validity), this paper also explores “perceived” quality attributes related to the potential adoption of the method among practitioners, namely in terms of learnability, perceived difficulty, and cost-effectiveness. We report two empirical studies which have been carried out to measure these quality attributes on a state-of-the-art inspection method for web usability, called MiLE+. The result of this work can be useful to scholars because it provides validation examples and a set of quality attributes to apply to other usability evaluation methods; it also benefits practitioners because it offers a clear guidance about what requirements they should look for when selecting a usability evaluation method for their own project needs.