Identifying Usability Issues of Software Analytics Applications in Immersive Augmented Reality

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the usability of a software analytics application in augmented reality, identifying issues caused by traditional UI elements and suggesting integration into immersive visualizations to improve user experience.

Contribution

It provides an iterative usability assessment of an AR analytics tool and highlights the need to replace conventional UI components with immersive visualization techniques.

Findings

Usability issues mainly stem from traditional UI elements.

The city visualization did not cause usability problems.

Replacing conventional UI with immersive visualization could enhance usability.

Abstract

Software analytics in augmented reality (AR) is said to have great potential. One reason why this potential is not yet fully exploited may be usability problems of the AR user interfaces. We present an iterative and qualitative usability evaluation with 15 subjects of a state-of-the-art application for software analytics in AR. We could identify and resolve numerous usability issues. Most of them were caused by applying conventional user interface elements, such as dialog windows, buttons, and scrollbars. The used city visualization, however, did not cause any usability issues. Therefore, we argue that future work should focus on making conventional user interface elements in AR obsolete by integrating their functionality into the immersive visualization.