Usability Evaluation of OFLAT Platform

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, David Alexandre Passão
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/163264
• topic: Automata Theory; Empirical Evaluation; Formal Languages; Process Mining; Software Engineering; Systematic Literature Review; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

In Formal Languages and Automata Theory (FLAT), interactive tools are critical because mathematical concepts have an algorithmic exposition that significantly benefits from presentations. Learning concepts and techniques crucially requires the understanding and visualization of algorithms. Given these concerns, the OFLAT application was developed. To be valid, it is necessary to offer a rich set of features that is intuitive and easy to use, supporting the students’ learning process. This research aims to understand and summarize the existing similar tools and how this type of assessment was made to those tools, compare the OFLAT platform with similar existing ones, and apply similar and other methods to make the assessment and present improvement suggestions for this application. Firstly, a systematic mapping study is made to gather information about similar existing tools and their assessments. Then, the evaluation of OFLAT is made through empirical studies (a controlled experiment and surveys to users) to systematically evaluate the platform, using techniques and methodologies of Software Engineering, in terms of its usability and, in general, its quality. The assessment results in a qualitative and quantitative evaluation with the participation of students enrolled in the Theory of Computation (TC) course. These results show that OFLAT promotes the level of correctness of actions (is more effective), promotes good usability, and does not require much effort. As a result of this study, guidelines for improving OFLAT user’s experience were obtained. It was concluded that the current version of OFLAT being evaluated is less error-prone and provides a better user experience than the previous version. With two iterations, we observe that OFLAT is converging to a better usable tool than the previous version in comparison to the competing solutions.