Usability is considered a relevant quality factor in video games. However, usability evaluations are usually performed too late in the game development lifecycle. We present a usability evaluation strategy that can be used in early stages of model-driven video game development approaches. The usability evaluation is based on a Video Game Usability Model, which extends the usability characterist...

Usability inspections can be employed in early phases of the software development process. They improve usability through artifacts that are built during the development of the software. These artifacts will influence the usability of the developed software. Usability inspection techniques have been proposed and considered as an effective alternative for addressing usability issues in early pha...

While usability evaluation is critical to designing usable websites, traditional usability testing can be both expensive and time consuming. The advent of crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower offer an intriguing new avenue for performing remote usability testing with potentially many users, quick turn-around, and significant cost savings. To investigate the pot...

A usability evaluation provides a strong and rich basis for understanding and improving the design of user interaction with a software system. Exploiting this evaluation requires feedback that significantly impacts the developers’ understanding of usability data about the interaction design of the system. This article presents results from an exploratory study of 2 ways of providing feedback fr...

This paper evaluates the quality of recommendations for improving a user interface resulting from a usability evaluation. The study compares usability comments written by different authors, but describing similar usability issues. The usability comments were provided by 17 professional teams who independently evaluated the usability of the website for the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. The stu...

This paper presents an approach for improving final software system usability by designing for usability, in particular by addressing usability issues in the software architecture. This approach differs from the traditional idea of measuring and improving usability once the system is complete. The work presented in this paper is part of the research conducted within the European Union IST STATU...

This paper examines in a problem posed recently concerning the relationship between software system usability and architecture. Here, we try to empirically clarify this relationship, focusing on the concept of architecture-sensitive usability mechanism. This concept represents specific usability issues that can improve software usability and that have demonstrated architectural implications. Ac...

The usability and safety of health information systems have become major issues in the design and implementation of useful healthcare IT. In this paper we describe a multi-phased multi-method approach to integrating usability engineering methods into system testing to ensure both usability and safety of healthcare IT upon widespread deployment. The approach involves usability testing followed b...

This paper presents results of the usability evaluation performed according to the methodology of fuzzy usability evaluation that was presented in the previous research of the authors. As a result of a particular evaluation, a usability score is obtained. The score combines various factors affecting the usability of target system. The authors demonstrate the methodology on the example of usabil...

Like any other software system quality attribute, usability places requirements on software components. In particular, it has been demonstrated that certain usability features have a direct impact throughout the software process. This paper details an approach that looks at how to deal with certain usability features in the early software development stages. In particular, we consider usability...