Usability Tool Support for Model-Based Web Development

When web engineering methods are used for the development of web
applications, models are created during the development process
which describe the website. Using the information present in these
models, it is possible to create usability tool support that is
more advanced than current approaches, which do not rely on the
presence of models. This dissertation presents ideas for tool
support during different phases of the development, such as the
implementation phase or the testing phase. For example, if a tool
knows from a model that the audience of a website are teenagers, it
can examine whether the words and sentences used on the website are
likely to be understood by teenagers. An approach is presented to
augment existing web engineering models with the additional
information ("age" in this case) and to make it available to tools,
e.g. via embedding it in HTML code. Two prototypes demonstrate the
concepts for integrating usability tool support into web
engineering.