Using consumer demands to bridge the gap between software engineering and usability engineering

A number of efforts are being undertaken to integrate usability engineering and software engineering in the software-development process. The majority of these integration efforts focus on software developers, usability engineers, or defining new processes. In this article, we report on an effort to involve the consumer of software by providing a mechanism, namely the common industry format (CIF), to formally request usability information on the software to be purchased. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.