Database support for usability testing

Software developers are expected to ship usable products to a world wide audience on increasingly tight development schedules. As usability professionals, our challenge is to help teams make use of test results. We know that in order to be effective, we must execute a variety of tasks, including: investigating fatures that have already been tested before writing the next set of tasks for that feature, communicating data in ways that are accessible and easy for everyone to understand, delivering usability results to product teams as quickly as possible, and tracking issues that recur. Usability professionals face another hurdle when trying to meet the needs of team members who may be located anywhere in the world. At Lotus, advanced workgroup technology has helped us address many of these problems. Our experience provides a case study of how we used collabora-tive technology to share information across an enterprise. In our sample scenario, developers and usabiliv professionals around the world solved user interface problems by using a shared resource, in this case Lotus Notes. Additionally, our scenario suggests some characteristics of collaborative technology, databases, and e-mail programs that are important to solving the hinds of problems