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Obstacles to usability evaluation in practice: a survey of software development organizations

Published: 20 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports from a combined questionnaire survey and interview study of obstacles for deploying usability evaluation in software development organizations. It was conducted in a limited geographical area. The purpose of the questionnaire survey was to determine whether software development organizations in that area were evaluating the usability of their software and to identify key obstacles. It revealed that 29 of 39 software development organizations conducted some form of usability evaluation. The purpose of the interview study was to gain more insight into the obstacles that were expressed. It involved 10 of the 39 software development organizations. Our results show, that the understanding of usability evaluation is a major obstacle. Furthermore, the two most significant obstacles were resource demands and the mindset of developers. These obstacles were not only an obstacle for more organizations to deploy usability evaluation, but also a concern for the software development organizations, that had deployed usability evaluations in their development process.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
NordiCHI '08: Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges
October 2008
621 pages
ISBN:9781595937049
DOI:10.1145/1463160
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 October 2008

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  1. obstacles
  2. software development
  3. usability evaluation

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  • (2023)UCD Sprint: A Fast Process to Involve Users in the Design Practices of Software CompaniesInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.227981640:23(8360-8377)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2023
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