A Usability Oriented Software Development Process with Constant Usability Evaluation

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.