Usability and Aesthetics: Better Together for Automated Repair of Web Pages

Abstract

With the recent explosive growth of mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, guaranteeing consistent web appearance across all environments has become a significant problem. This happens simply because it is hard to keep track of the web appearance on different sizes and types of devices that render the web pages. Therefore, fixing the inconsistent appearance of web pages can be difficult, and the cost incurred can be huge, e.g., poor user experience and financial loss due to it. Recently, automated web repair techniques have been proposed to automatically resolve inconsistent web page appearance, focusing on improving usability. However, generated patches tend to disrupt the webpage's layout, rendering the repaired webpage aesthetically unpleasing, e.g., distorted images or misalignment of components. In this paper, we propose an automated repair approach for web pages based on meta-heuristic algorithms that can assure both usability and aesthetics. The key novelty that empowers our approach is a novel fitness function that allows us to optimistically evolve buggy web pages to find the best solution that optimizes both usability and aesthetics at the same time. Empirical evaluations show that our approach is able to successfully resolve mobile-friendly problems in 94% of the evaluation subjects, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baseline techniques in terms of both usability and aesthetics.