Supporting Web Developers in Evaluating Usability and Identifying Usability Problems

Abstract

Support to website developers without formal training in human-computer interaction that enable them to conduct their own usability evaluations would radically advance integration of usability engineering in web development. This chapter presents experiences from usability evaluations conducted by developers and results from an empirical study of means to support non-experts in identifying usability problems. A group of software developers who were novices in usability engineering analyzed a usability test session with the task of identifying usability problems experienced by the user. In their analysis they employed a simple one-page tool that has been developed to support identification of usability problems. The non-experts were able to conduct a well-organized usability evaluation and identify a reasonable amount of usability problems with a performance that was comparable to usability experts.