Usability Planner: Development of a Tool to Support the Selection and Estimation of Cost Benefits of UCD Methods

Despite a growing interest in usability techniques in the overall systems development practice, and the existence of standards aiming to guide the selection of UCD (User-Centred Design) methods, the diversity of usability methods available for application, and the lack of easy to use rules for selecting and applying them makes selecting and planning UCD activities a hard task with little or no support available. This paper presents the Usability Planner tool, aimed to provide such support. Usability Planner suggests appropriate UCD methods for each software life cycle stage taking account of the particular constraints to consider, and includes support for prioritising types of methods based on potential business benefits and risks. Usability Planner is being developed as an open access and open source project. It has proceeded so far with iterations of wire frame prototypes, allowing feedback to be gathered from usability professionals and software developers, and with the building of the first software prototype.

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