Abstract:
Usability has become an important aspect of software applications and it
is gaining importance increasingly. A number of approaches have been presented
to develop more usable applications. However, as their focus is mainly
on usability tasks and not on software engineering principles, consequently
software engineers have failed to adopt them. Moreover, usability evaluation
which is very critical in improving usability, is also neglected by usability
models. A complete software development process is proposed in this thesis
that integrates usability tasks and evaluation methods with software engineering
activities. It focuses on constant usability evaluation throughout the
software life cycle process and helps take necessary action to screen out usability
issues in earlier phases. The proposed process is very close to general
software development process which will help software developers to adopt it
and include usability aspects in software applications in a seamless way. The
validity of the process has been assessed by developing di erent software applications
by using the proposed process. The results show that the process
helped in handling most of the usability issues and changes in requirements
in early design phase. Moreover, better levels of usability and user satisfaction
rate were achieved by using the process in contrast to the software
projects that did not use the proposed process. Though, the proposed process
involves additional usability tasks but there was no major impact in
overall software development time as observed in di erent case studies. Additionally,
it helped in saving signi cant time in the development phase with
enhanced usability of the developed applications.
