[Sigia-l] Automated User Testing

[Karl Fast]

> How could automated testing test time on page, success
> rate/abandonment, paths, etc ? Surely these are only relevant to
> human users. 

There are some tools that attempt to automatically evaluate a web
site, using algorithms to compute quantitative user experience
metrics. I don't know if they are any good, but there certainly have
been attempts to computational simulate user interaction with a web
site and estimate the usability.

I can think of three.

On the research side, there is WebTango. This was a project at the
University of Berkeley. Marti Hearst and Melody Ivory were the
researchers. I don't know the current status of this.

   http://webtango.berkeley.edu/

On the commercial side, I know that UsableNet sells software in this
area. Sort of. I don't know the exact details of what their software
does (been years since I looked at this).

   http://www.usablenet.com/

Lastly, there was a company called...WebMetrics, or something like
that. They had a crawler that would generate usability reports. It
used GOMS modeling. I don't know if they are still around.

Does anyone else remember this company? I can't quite remember the
name. I'm not sure WebMetrics is correct...



-- 
Karl Fast
http://www.livingskies.com/