An On-Line A/B Tester for Comparing User Interface Design Alternatives

What is it about?

We introduce AB4Web, a web-based engine that implements a balanced randomized version of the multivariate A/B testing, specifically designed for practitioners to readily compare end-users' preferences for user interface alternatives, such as menu layouts, widgets, controls, forms, or visual input commands. AB4Web automatically generates a balanced set of randomized pairs from a pool of user interface design alternatives, presents them to participants, collects their preferences, and reports results from the perspective of four quantitative measures: the number of presentations, the preference percentage, the latent score of preference, and the matrix of preferences. In this paper, we exemplify the AB4Web tester with a user study for which N=108 participants expressed their preferences regarding the visual design of 49 distinct graphical adaptive menus, with a total number of 5,400 preference votes. We compare the results obtained from our quantitative measures with four alternative methods: Condorcet, de Borda count starting at one and zero, and the Dowdall scoring system. We plan to release AB4Web as a public tool for practitioners to create their own A/B testing experiments.

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