Avoiding laboratories to collect usability data: two software applications

This article introduces two software applications developed to establish the impact of certain usability mechanisms on particular usability attributes. The focus is put into the mechanisms that Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Engineering (SE) authors regard as "Highly Impacting" (like Undo/Cancel or System Status Feedback). The applications are web-based and designed to gather quantitative and qualitative data concerning the user's behavior when the application has usability mechanisms activated or not. The first application represents our initial approximation to gather such data, however we identified some drawbacks. A second application was designed to overcome such problems and allows a more suited usability evaluation.