Usability Engineering in the Wild: How Do Practitioners Integrate Usability Engineering in Software Development?

Abstract

It has been argued that too much research on usability engineering is incoherent with the processes, and settings being the realities for practitioners. In this paper we want to extend the existing knowledge about usability engineering in the wild. Through 12 semi-structured interviews we wanted to get an understanding of how usability is perceived, and practiced in reality. We found that our participants primarily focus on upfront work to support the design, and implementation process. They implement usability engineering through informal evaluations, and by following a set of local de facto standards. We want to extend the existing body of knowledge about usability engineering in practice, to support the development of methods aimed at practitioners.

Redesign workshop

“…A need also reported by other software development organizations [1]. The participants pointed out that the approach of the workshop potentially could lead to more internal discussion in the development team, as the workshop provided some concrete tools.…”

“…For each problem the following was given: a short description, a severity rating in the form: minor, moderate and severe, a list of all evaluators identifying the problem, a short redesign suggestion, a complexity rating (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8), and a business value rating (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8).…”

“…In industry, usability problem solving is commonly done unsystematically through discussion with colleagues, and by looking at how others have solved similar problems [1]. With the approach presented here, we wanted to explorer one approach towards more systematic problem solving.…”

“…Studies of industry practice yield that for usability evaluations to be useful they must provide feedback that easily can be acted upon [1,8]. Traditional usability reports have been found useful, but they are lacking information needed by developers [5].…”

“…As training software developers in usability engineering has shown positive results [3], we included a lecture about interaction design to provide a basic theoretical foundation. The focus was to have the developers collaborate, and involved actively in the process of improving the usability of the released TonePrint Editor software 1 . In this paper we report a hands-on approach towards running such a redesign workshop.…”