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Goal: Provide software engineers with a set of
effort based objective metrics and measures to pinpoint usability
issues early in the software development process.
Motivation: Many software engineers consider
usability testing as one of the more tedious and least satisfying
tests to conduct. A
2007 study of Swiss software engineers, found that 61.9% of the
respondents did not conduct usability tests; even though 40% of the
respondents view usability tests as useful. Ask almost any computer
user what can software engineers do to make the software better,
and the answer will be to make the software more “user-friendly”.
Like most broad-brush terms, “user-friendly” is a very
ambiguous term. One
noted authority on software usability, Jacob Nielson, says that
end-users really don’t want the computer to be their friend; they
just don’t want them to be a barrier to accomplishing an objective.
Poor software usability cannot only cause barriers to
accomplishing objectives it can cause deaths, as in the Therac-25
accident. Therefore the project concentrates on developing the
metrics required for the multidimensional usability evaluation and
the strategies allowing to address usability issues.
Project Status: Looking for students
interested in the project. The students will participate in the
various usability assessments and interface improvements . Please
contact Dr. Komogortsev (ok11@txstate.edu) if interested in
participation.
Publications:
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Mueller, C., Tamir, D., Komogortsev, O., Feldman, L. An Economical Approach to Usability Testing. To appear in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2009), July 2009. [.pdf]
Komogortsev, O., Mueller, C., Tamir, D., Feldman, L. An Effort Based Model of Software Usability. To appear in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice (SETP 2009), July 2009. [.pdf]
Tamir D., Komogortsev O. and Mueller C. An Effort and Time Based Measure of Usability. In Proceedings of the 6th international Workshop on Software Quality (WoSQ 2008), May 2008. pp. 1-6. [.pdf]
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