UXAgent: A System for Simulating Usability Testing of Web Design with LLM Agents

Abstract: Usability testing is a fundamental research method that user experience (UX) researchers use to evaluate and iterate a web design, but\textbf{ how to evaluate and iterate the usability testing study design } itself? Recent advances in LLM-simulated Agent (\textbf{LLM Agent}) research inspired us to design \textbf{UXAgent} to support UX researchers in evaluating and reiterating their usability testing study design before they conduct the real human-subject study. Our system features a Persona Generator module, an LLM Agent module, and a Universal Browser Connector module to automatically generate thousands of simulated users to interactively test the target website. The system also provides an Agent Interview Interface and a Video Replay Interface so that the UX researchers can easily review and analyze the generated qualitative and quantitative log data. Through a heuristic evaluation, five UX researcher participants praised the innovation of our system but also expressed concerns about the future of LLM Agent usage in UX studies.