User experience is a crucial aspect of software quality, and while various guidelines and heuristics have been proposed to enhance it, tables have not received as much attention as other elements. Additionally, many developers are unaware of the guidelines they should follow in this regard. The objective of this article is to enhance the user experience on websites by streamlining the development process of usable tables. To achieve this, we propose a set of heuristics integrated into a tool called BetterTable that enables automatic application of usability improvements while parsing the HTML document. The complexity involved in developing a table with applied usability guidelines is evaluated using different implementations: the proposed approach, DataTables, and AntDesign. Furthermore, tests are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristics through user interactions with 13 table usage scenarios, measuring time, mouse movement, and clicks. Each user is randomly presented with 13 scenarios that either meet or do not meet a specific guideline. The results indicate that our proposal reduces implementation complexity by 43.83% and 24.69% compared to DataTables and AntDesign, respectively. Moreover, user testing reveals that 6 out of the 13 guidelines show improvements in at least 2 of the 3 calculated metrics. Guidelines fulfilled show 40.37% less average completion time and 20.39% less mouse movement than the baseline. Based on the conducted studies, we observed that compliant tables, on average, exhibit reduced user time and mouse movements compared to non-compliant tables. However, no significant differences are found in terms of clicks.

There is a lack of automatic evaluation models to measure the user experience (UX) of online systems, especially in relation to the user interaction. In this paper we propose the interaction effort score as a factor that contributes to the measure of the UX of a web page. The interaction effort is automatically computed as an aggregation of the effort on each interactive widget of a page, and for all users that have interacted with them.\nIn turn, the effort on each widget is predicted from different micro-measures computed on the user interaction, by learning from manual UX expert ratings. This paper describes the evaluation of the interaction effort of different web forms, and how it compares to other metrics of usability and user interaction. It also shows possible applications of the interaction effort score in the automatic evaluation of web pages.

Usability and user interaction improvement is a central task in web development to guarantee the success of a web application. However, designers are barely able to keep up with the current development cycle because their practices are too costly, while interaction issues accumulate in applications that end-users keep suffering. In this work, we propose a method for designers to rapidly explore solutions through visual programming to the interaction problems of an application under development, even when it has been already deployed. The method is realized by a tool called UX-Painter, an exploratory tool for designers to apply quick fixes to interaction issues at the client-side of a web application without the need of any script programming knowledge. The palette of available fixes in UX-Painter are client-side web refactorings, i.e., changes to web page elements that solve specific user interaction problems without changing the underlying functionality. UX-Painter allows designers to quickly set up new versions of a web application by combining refactorings to create alternative designs for user testing or an inspection review. UX-Painter also provides the means to communicate design improvements, as a sequence of refactorings with clear semantics. We show the feedback provided by interviews with designers about UX-Painter's functionality and the results of a user test about its usability.

Client-Side Web Refactorings (CSWRs) allow improving interaction aspects of web applications by applying changes to the user interface without altering the code base, even in production settings. However, developers are not always willing, or even allowed to apply external adaptations to their applications’ user interface. Besides, CSWRs do not guarantee improvements in all contexts, so it may be unwise to install them in a production version. We propose a tool that allows creating private versions of a running web application almost automatically. Using this tool, developers or usability experts can easily combine CSWRs to create alternative versions of web applications, without the need of creating a cloned sandbox environment for each version. This yields many uses, such as quickly setting up user tests, showing live alternatives to Product Owners, and even performing A/B testing. The tool is built on top of Kobold, a service that allows applying CSWRs to fix usability smells. Kobold with versioning is available at: https://autorefactoring.lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar. A screencast of the tool is available at https://youtu.be/LVc3BOtVP3I.

While Web applications have become pervasive in today's business, social interaction and information exchange, their usability is often deficient, even being a key factor for a website success. Usability problems repeat across websites, and many of them have been catalogued, but usability evaluation and repair still remains expensive. There are efforts from both the academy and industry to automate usability testing or to provide automatic statistics, but they rarely offer concrete solutions. These solutions appear as guidelines or patterns that developers can follow manually. This paper presents Kobold, a tool that detects usability problems from real user interaction (UI) events and repairs them automatically when possible, at least suggesting concrete solutions. By using the refactoring technique and its associated concept of bad smell, Kobold mines UI events to detect usability smells and applies usability refactorings on the client to correct them. The purpose of Kobold is to deliver usability advice and solutions as a service (SaaS) for developers, allowing them to respond to feedback of the real use of their applications and improve usability incrementally, even when there are no usability experts on the team. Kobold is available at: http://autorefactoring.lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar. A screencast is available at https://youtu.be/c-myYPMUh0Q.

Though Web Applications development fits well with Test-Driven Development, there are some problems that hinder its success. In this demo we present a tool suite to improve TDD; the suite supports the representation of web requirements using a domain-specific language and the automatic generation of interaction tests among others.