A Framework to Semi-automated Usability Evaluations Processing Considering Users’ Emotional Aspects

The concern with providing a good experience for users increases simultaneously with technological evolution and dissemination. Different evaluation methods are presented in the literature to help developers evaluate and verify the interfaces they develop. However, for the application of evaluation methods, it is often necessary to have an expert, or users, which can make the assessment costly, both time-consumingly and monetarily. Consequently, developers may launch their products without carefully checking some critical aspects beforehand, causing anything from the non-acceptance of the technology to even its abandonment. Carrying out part of the evaluations with users, or totally with them, in an automated way, considering the diversity of data obtained and the support of analyzes processed by a computer, presents itself as a possible alternative to be investigated to support developers of interactive systems. At the same time, considering the emotional aspects during the interaction can provide the developer with valuable information, including the acceptance of the technology. In this way, considering users’ emotions can improve the automatic evaluation results, capturing and processing the user experience in the system. Thus, we present a framework (EmotiUsing) composed of semi-automated usability evaluations, considering the emotional aspects of users. The framework aims to make the analytical evaluations less subjective and streamline the evaluation process, reducing costs and time for the evaluators.