Exploring Multiple Usability Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract. Industrial usability work often fails to produce the expected impact on software products even though significant resources have been used on uncovering problems and suggesting improvements. So, it seems that feedback from industrial usability work lacks persuasiveness, i.e. it fails to convince the key stakeholders that actions need to be taken. This study reports from interviews with 26 stakeholders in software development projects. Our data suggests that the interviewees address usability using different perspectives and based on our observations we describe five such perspectives. Further, we discuss how applying different usability perspectives might inform the persuasiveness of usability work.