Behavior-based usability testing of user manuals

The usability of software user manuals is vitally important to ensure that the products can be easily accepted by customers without face-to-face training, especially for those software delivered in service model. Manual checking is an intuitive way to improve the usability of user manual. However, manual checking is costly. In this paper, we propose a behavior analysis based approach to automatically checking the usability of user manual. By capturing user´ behaviors executing the user manual, the analysis tool analyzes the behavior sets to identify possible usability problems by referring to predefined usability patterns. A case study is conducted to demonstrate that our approach is feasible and effective for manual testing at the end of the paper.