Automated usability testing for mobile applications

In this paper we discuss the design and implementation of an automated usability evaluation method for iOS applications. In contrast to common usability testing methods, it is not explicitly necessary to involve an expert or subjects. These circumstances reduce costs, time and personnel expenditures. Professionals are replaced by the automation tool while test participants are exchanged with consumers of the launched application. Interactions of users are captured via a fully automated capturing framework which creates a record of user interactions for each session and sends them to a central server. A usability problem is defined as a sequence of interactions and pattern recognition specified by interaction design patterns is applied to find these problems. Nevertheless, it falls back to the user input for accurate results. Similar to the problem, the solution of the problem is based on the HCI design pattern. An evaluation shows the functionality of our approach compared to a traditional usability evaluation method.