Towards systematic usability verification

Abstract

Although usability is the core aspect of the whole HCI research field, it still waits for its economic breakthrough. There are some corporations that are famous for their usable products, but small and medium-sized businesses tend to prefer features over usability. We think, the primary reason is that there are no inexpensive methods to at least prevent huge design flaws. We propose the use of test specifications. Once defined for a domain, these allow non-usability experts to systematically verify the usability of a given system without any users involved. We picked a sample domain with some basic tasks and found strong indication of our hypothesis: test specifications can be applied by non-experts and are able to find major design flaws. Future work will extend this method to more complex tasks and evaluate the economic benefit.