Integrating Usability Engineering with Software Engineering: a preliminary view on aspects surrounding the topic of usability integration

Usability integration is an emergent research topic that introduces both researchers and practitioners to new problems and challenges. These problems appear to stem from different world-views adopted by the participating fields of disciplines and the established organizational settings. Introducing a paradigmatic change can be a difficult task to accomplish in this setting. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Engineering (SE) are two fields of disciplines with very different views on how information systems should be developed. HCI focuses on ‘soft’ human related issues and SE focuses on ‘hard’ software related issues regarding the artifact that is to be designed and implemented. The third party is the field of Information Systems Research and it provides perspectives that reach beyond both HCI and SE. Organizational change is elaborated since the most radical suggestions for organizations to start actually producing usable products involves changing the way organizations think and work. In this paper it is suggested that usability integration should be investigated from the perspectives of both participating disciplines with a special focus on organizational context and culture in order to fully capture the aspects surrounding the topic of usability integration. Current literature and research on usability integration appears to focus on the following aspects: paradigmatic differences of HCI and SE, common problems and challenges of usability integration, the unique organizational contexts of integration, the paradigmatic shift from technology driven systems development into user-driven development and organizational change agentry. Aikio, Kari-Pekka. (2006) Integrating Usability Engineering with Software Engineering: a preliminary view on aspects surrounding the topic of usability integration.