Usability Evaluation of a Corporate Memory System

Abstract

Improving and supporting the process of design knowledge reuse in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry can lead to corporate competi tive advantage. Whereas internal knowledge reuse from one’s personal experiences is very effective, external knowledge reuse from an external digital or paper archive often fails. Based on a formalization of the internal reuse process from ethnographic s tudies, a prototype system, CoMem (Corporate Memory) is presented, which supports the reuse process, i.e., finding and understanding. This paper presents a usability testing framework and methodology and a usability evaluation of CoMem using formal user t esting. The key dimensions for the usability testing are the size of the repository and the type of finding task: exploration versus retrieval. The usability evaluation results are presented and discussed.