Which, When and How Usability Techniques and Activities Should Be Integrated

Abstract

Software development organizations are paying more and more attention to the usability of their software products, as increasing importance is attached to usability as a critical software quality attribute. The HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) field offers techniques aimed at producing a software product with a good usability level, but their use is often not integrated into SE (software engineering) development processes. The integration of usability techniques into SE practice is not an easy endeavor, since both fields speak different languages and deal with software development from different perspectives. This chapter presents a framework for the integration of usability techniques and activities. This framework characterizes selected usability techniques and activities using SE terminology and concepts, according to what kind of activity they belong to and at what development stage their application contributes most to the usability of the final software product. Software developers may then manage usability activities and techniques, include them in their software process, and understand in which activities usability and SE techniques have to be merged to achieve concurrent objectives. The proposed framework is aimed at software development organizations with a defined iterative development process that are looking to enhance their process with usability aspects.