OHT+Experience: User Experience (UX) analysis in Qt applications
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The OHT+Experience is a usability testing tool whose aim is to extract the user experience from the interaction with a software. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and product ownership. It also covers the perceptions of practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system.
It is very useful for usability experts and developers to measure user satisfaction level both with the GUI and the overall behavior of a software. This software allows the testers to perform most of the whole process of a usability test, as it allows to design the briefing stage (composed of a set of test cases to be performed by the users), guide the user during the test-case performing, store the comments and impression of the users and show them to the expert.
You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/v/gGrV7ph9iCY
(sorry, I can't embed it here)Once the expert has designed a set of test-cases to be performed by the users, during the test case execution, the OHT+Experience automatically conducts the test session telling the users what to do, and collecting their impressions, comments, and suggestions. Finally, both the test cases and the impressions of the user are stored in a project for further analysis. This software also includes a test conduction assistant, which shows the elements the user has to interact with by using visual help (i.e. the tool denotes with red color the elements that have to be interacted; it uses green color to denote the elements already interacted with).
You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/v/odg_vSgkoI8
(sorry, I can't embed it here)This tool could be also used in many ways, as for instance to ease communication between experts and developers, as the usability experts can play the user role and use this tool to evaluate a GUI (both the GUI aspect and the use cases) and include all the comments and corrections for the development team to improve the GUI. Another way to use this tool is for designing operator guides. Before the software deployment, the development team can design the use cases using the OHT+Experience. Then, these use cases can be used to train the final user at the beginning of the software deployment phase. This prototype could be easily extended to enhance its features, or also to fit it to other testing environments.
The OHT+Experience tool can be downloaded from SourceForge. Click "here":https://sourceforge.net/projects/ohtpexperience/ to download.
Further information related to this project and other projects can be found in the "Cátedra SAES UMU":http://www.um.es/catedrasaes webpage.
Enjoy it!!
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Interesting tool. Sometimes such thing is defintely needed. Maybe also adding some recording of user actions will be useful to analyse quality of UX later.
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Hi!!
Thanks for your comment. We released about a year ago a prototype to record (and later replay) user actions. It was called "OpenHMI-Tester (OHT)":http://catedrasaes.inf.um.es/trac/wiki/ProjectsOht, and incorporating its functionality into our current usability evaluation&measurement prototypes is a hot topic we are considering, as it would be very useful for experts to analyze the actions the user performed, along with all the comments already collected by the OHT+Experience tool. This prototype is described below, it can be downloaded from "here":http://sourceforge.net/projects/openhmitester/ , and further information can be found in the "Cátedra SAES UMU website":http://www.catedrasaes.org
The "OHT":http://www.catedrasaes.org/trac/wiki/ProjectsOht is an Open Source GUI Testing tool which follows an open architecture that describes a non intrusive capture/replay tool based on GUI (and non-GUI) Events. Its aim is to give developers the possibility of testing HMIs (Human-Machine Interfaces) by performing both a recording (capturing the events generated by the tested HMI) and replay (executing the previously recorded events) processes over the tested application.
These videos show how the OHT works: the capture and replay processes, GUI position and changes tolerance, ease of use, etc.
http://www.youtube.com/v/0u04Q9lmbok
http://www.youtube.com/v/sxk0N_lQqwY
This tool can be modified in order to be adapted to the different characteristics of the testing environment: windowing system, operating system, test file representation, etc. It allows the developers to adapt and use this tool in their developments regardless of the characteristics of the execution (and testing) environment.
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Hi again!!
Maybe once you have successfully downloaded and compiled the project, you attempt to execute it and it does not work fine.
The problem is that the testing module did not find the "libCSU" library, so you need to update the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable in the following way:export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/home/...../xxxxxxxxx/bin/csaesumulib/lib
where "xxxxxxxxx" is the folder in which the prototype was installed.
I hope it will help you to solve the problem, and do not hesitate to send a nes post if you need further help.
Cheers!!
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Hi!!
I write this post to add that the corporation for which we are doing our research has successfully integrated this tool in their processes for building "live" and in-situ operator guides. So, they found another field in which this tool can be used.
The users of their software can perform an instruction process over the real software, instead of using other "off-line" techniques as videos, manuals, etc. In that way, the user experience is improved due to the user is learning while he/she is interacting to the real software.
I hope this tool can be useful for you.
Cheers!!