Incorporating Marketing Strategies to Improve Usability Assurance in User-Centered Design Processes

Nowadays, international companies have been using different strategies in order to obtain more attractive products and get a higher impact on the market. But when referring to software products, it is necessary to keep in mind that such strategies are affected by specific quality criteria as usability. Usability and marketing can be combined to offer more attractive products. In fact, specific instances of marketing technics have been gradually adopted by software engineers to improve usability. All in all, there is a lack of systematic approaches dealing with the integration of both marketing and usability through activities in a user-centered development process. To face such challenge, in this paper we have selected the most important marketing strategies to be integrated as activities in a user-centered process model. Activities were classified into Pre-Development, Development and Post-Development, and they have been sorted out depending on the marketing processes taking place before, during and after the development of a software product, respectively.