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.

Redesign workshop

“…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).…”

“…The question leading this redesign workshop was: "Can software developers contribute actively to alternative redesign suggestions?" 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 .…”

Active Involvement of Software Developers in Usability Engineering: Two Small-Scale Case Studies

“…A few developers had limited knowledge about human-computer interaction and interaction design gained during their studies. Both organizations participated in similar usability evaluation training [6] and redesign activities [3,4]. The purpose was to introduce usability engineering into the organizations and provide the development teams with basic competencies applicable in their day-to-day development practices.…”

“…It has been pointed out that insights about the impact of usability engineering in real world projects are needed [22,32] along with focusing research on concepts that can be implemented into practical settings [11,17,25]. We here present two smallscale case studies building upon previous work focused on providing developers with basic skills in usability engineering [3,4,6].…”

What Is Hidden in a Heuristic Evaluation: Tactics From the Experts

“…Although, to achieve the best quality in results of a HE, organizations must count on multiple expert evaluators (Borys & Laskowski, 2014:144), (Johannessen & Hornbaek, 2014:195); Nielsen & Molich, 1990:249), (Nielsen, 1992(Nielsen, , 1994b. Counting on multiple expert evaluators still represents an expensive price for organizations of low monetary power as not-for-profit and Micro and Small Enterprises (Bruun & Stage, 2014:1148, (Bruun and Stage, 2015:40), (Koutsabasis, Spyrou, Darzentas, & Darzentas, 2007:18). Through a literature review, one can see that studies that explore alternatives to adapt the…”