Barefoot usability evaluations

Abstract

Usability evaluations provide software development teams with insights on the degree to which a software application enables a user to achieve his/her goals, how fast these goals can be achieved, how easy it is to learn and how satisfactory it is in use. Although usability evaluations are crucial in the process of developing software systems with a high level of usability, their use is still limited in the context of small software development companies. Several approaches have been proposed to support software development practitioners (SWPs) in conducting usability evaluations and this paper presents two in-depth empirical studies of supporting SWPs by training them to become barefoot usability evaluators. Findings show that the SWPs after 30 hours of training obtained considerable abilities in identifying usability problems and that this approach revealed a high level of downstream utility. Results also show that the SWPs created relaxed conditions for the test users when acting as test monitors but experienced problems with making users think aloud. Considering the quality of problem descriptions, we found that the SWPs were better at providing clear and precise problem descriptions than at describing the impact, cause, user actions and providing data support for observations.