Human performance modeling for all: Importing UI prototypes into CogTool

UI designers use a variety of prototyping tools, from paper and pencil sketching, to drag-and-drop mock-up tools (e.g., Balsamiq Mockups), to sophisticated suites of modeling tools and toolkits (e.g., iRise or dijit, the dojo GUI toolkit ). Many projects would benefit from quickly analyzing prototypes at an early stage without the effort of bringing in users for empirical tests. Most analysis tools, however (e.g., AutoCWW [1], Bloodhound [2], and CogTool [4]), require prototypes to be in their own format, which forces the designer to re-do the prototypes in order to analyze them. Our work is a step toward allowing the CogTool analysis tools to import from many different prototyping tools, so designers will have a path to quick usability analysis without changing the way they currently express their preliminary designs. © 2010 Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).