Discovering Unanticipated Uses of Interactive Applications to Improve Usability and Enhance Functionality

As users use an interactive application, they may, deliberately or inadvertently, use it in ways not anticipated by the developer. Unanticipated use of an application is considered an important and positive phenomenon. It reveals clues to improve usability and enhance functionality, which were not conceived of in the initial design phase. However, developers often fail to benefit from such an opportunity due to the lack of sufficient knowledge about user behavior with respect to task completion. We propose an approach to discovering unexpected uses of an interactive application. In our approach, we choose aspect-oriented instrumentation to capture user interface events across architectural boundaries of an interactive application, perform model-based analysis to identify tasks and task sequences from preprocessed event traces, and conduct criteria-guided evaluation to discover unanticipated uses. Our goal is to provide tool support that is adaptable to an evolving application.