Paper Title
Towards Producing Usable Software: A Model For Incorporating Usability Evaluation Activities During Product Development Based on ISO Standards
Abstract
Usability evaluation is essential for developing usable software systems, yet its integration within the
development process is an interdisciplinary endeavour that remains challenging. Different priorities and approaches hinder
collaboration between professionals from usability and software engineering, as well as pre-existing organizational activities,
methods and artifacts. Current usability evaluation integration solutions are highly specific to their operational areas, leading
to poor transferability of activities or methods to other practical contexts. We think that a more abstract basis of
incorporation would remove process or organization-specific details that hinder interdisciplinary collaboration. Thus, this
paper proposes using ISO standards as a solid basis for incorporating usability evaluation into the software development
process. Furthermore, standards are universally agreed guidelines, thus are a reasonable basis for bringing a more
transferable incorporation process. We created a comprehensive model consisting of fundamental activities and artifacts
from usability engineering (limited to usability evaluation) and from software engineering (also limited to development
process). Common activities were identified; whereas artifacts and dependencies were established, resulting in an
incorporation model that is more clearly for organizations to compare and discuss their processes.
Keywords- Usability, Usability Evaluation, Software Development Process, ISO Standards.