Review of Usability Capability Assessment Approaches

Improving the strategic impact of user-centred design in development organisations has proved to be a challenge. An effective step to start any improvement process is to perform current state analysis. Our research focused on examining and understanding the existing knowledge on how to perform current state analysis of usercentred design, or as we call, usability capability assessment (UCA). We analyse six different UCA methods based on the existing literature. Our analysis shows that the methods originating from software process assessment give best practical guidance for performing an assessment. On the other hand, our examination shows that the level of research knowledge about the UCA methods is generally very minimal. There are practically no evaluations of the effectiveness of any methods. None of the methods refer to any theoretical basis.