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Towards a catalog of usability smells

Published: 13 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a catalog of smells in the context of interactive applications. These so-called usability smells are indicators of poor design on an application's user interface, with the potential to hinder not only its usability but also its maintenance and evolution. To eliminate such usability smells we discuss a set of program/usability refactorings. In order to validate the presented usability smells catalog, and the associated refactorings, we present a preliminary empirical study with software developers in the context of a real open source hospital management application. Moreover, a tool that computes graphical user interface behavior models, giving the applications' source code, is used to automatically detect usability smells at the model level.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Software Requirement Smells and Detection Techniques: A Systematic Literature ReviewCybernetics and Information Technologies10.2478/cait-2024-003724:4(78-107)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2024
  • (2024)A Catalog of Transformations to Remove Smells From Natural Language TestsProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661225(7-16)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Development of Data-driven Persona Including User Behavior and Pain Point through Clustering with User Log of B2B SoftwareProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 17th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/3641822.3641870(85-90)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '15: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
April 2015
2418 pages
ISBN:9781450331968
DOI:10.1145/2695664
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 13 April 2015

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Author Tags

  1. code smells
  2. empirical studies
  3. graphical user interfaces

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • ERDF - European Regional Development Fund & FCT - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology

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SAC 2015
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SAC 2015: Symposium on Applied Computing
April 13 - 17, 2015
Salamanca, Spain

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SAC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 291 of 1,211 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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SAC '25
The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
March 31 - April 4, 2025
Catania , Italy

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Software Requirement Smells and Detection Techniques: A Systematic Literature ReviewCybernetics and Information Technologies10.2478/cait-2024-003724:4(78-107)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2024
  • (2024)A Catalog of Transformations to Remove Smells From Natural Language TestsProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661225(7-16)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Development of Data-driven Persona Including User Behavior and Pain Point through Clustering with User Log of B2B SoftwareProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 17th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/3641822.3641870(85-90)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Android Source Code Smells: A Systematic Literature ReviewSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.3401Online publication date: 27-Dec-2024
  • (2023)Resource Allocation Modeling Framework to Refactor Software Design SmellsInternational Journal of Mathematical, Engineering and Management Sciences10.33889/IJMEMS.2023.8.2.0138:2(213-229)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Developing algorithmic business resource optimization model for code smells detection: an applied case insight from enterprise level software management systemAnnals of Operations Research10.1007/s10479-023-05536-7Online publication date: 25-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Code Smells: A Comprehensive Online Catalog and TaxonomyDevelopments in Information and Knowledge Management Systems for Business Applications10.1007/978-3-031-25695-0_24(543-576)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2023
  • (2022)A Framework to Semi-automated Usability Evaluations Processing Considering Users’ Emotional AspectsHuman-Computer Interaction. Theoretical Approaches and Design Methods10.1007/978-3-031-05311-5_29(419-438)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2022
  • (2021)Usability Smells: A Systematic ReviewITNG 2021 18th International Conference on Information Technology-New Generations10.1007/978-3-030-70416-2_36(281-288)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2021
  • (2019)Usability smellsProceedings of the Fifteenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3361476.3361494(245-257)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
  • Show More Cited By

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