Usability: A Critical Analysis and a Taxonomy

A major obstacle to the implantation of User-Centered Design in the real world is the fact that no precise definition of the concept of usability exists that is widely accepted and applied in practice. Generally speaking, the literature tends to define usability in overly brief and ambiguous terms and to describe its application in informal terms. This is one of the main reasons why ad hoc techniques predominate in usability study methodologies. The aims of this article are to investigate the concept of usability and to describe it by means of a detailed taxonomy that is organized hierarchically and that contains exhaustive descriptions of usability attributes. This taxonomy can be used to support different stages in the development of usable systems.

[1]  Gerrit C. van der Veer,et al.  Breaking Down Usability , 1999, INTERACT.

[2]  Whitney Quesenbery,et al.  Dimensions of Usability: Defining the Conversation, Driving the Process , 2003 .

[3]  Jakob Nielsen,et al.  Chapter 4 – The Usability Engineering Lifecycle , 1993 .

[4]  Andreas Holzinger,et al.  Usability engineering methods for software developers , 2005, CACM.

[5]  Anthony Chandor,et al.  The Penguin dictionary of computers , 1977 .

[6]  Jeff Sauro,et al.  A method to standardize usability metrics into a single score , 2005, CHI.

[7]  Jakob Nielsen,et al.  Prioritizing Web Usability , 2006 .

[8]  Martin C. Maguire,et al.  Context of Use within usability activities , 2001, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[9]  Jurek Kirakowski,et al.  What is Usability , 1991 .

[10]  Miles MacLeod,et al.  Usability measurement in context , 1994, Behav. Inf. Technol..

[11]  Jenny Preece,et al.  A Guide to Usability: Human Factors in Computing , 1993 .

[12]  Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals ( VDTs ) — Part 11 : Guidance on usability , 1998 .

[13]  Rex B. Kline,et al.  Usability measurement and metrics: A consolidated model , 2006, Software Quality Journal.

[14]  Jakob Nielsen,et al.  Usability engineering , 1997, The Computer Science and Engineering Handbook.

[15]  Alain Abran,et al.  Usability Meanings and Interpretations in ISO Standards , 2003, Software Quality Journal.

[16]  W. Buxton.  Human-Computer Interaction , 1988, Springer Berlin Heidelberg.