Usability Engineering: Our Experience and Evolution

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the user's experience and evolution of usability engineering. Usability engineering starts with a commitment to action in the world. It seeks to capture user experience within a context situated in user work and in a form useful for engineering. Usability engineering provides operationally defined criteria so that usability objectives can be used to drive an efficient and productive engineering effort, and it can lead to production of systems that are experienced by users as usable and that serve as a basis for the next generation of systems. When a system is built and delivered to users, interaction with it would affect user experience and would shift the background against which users evaluate that system in comparison with other systems. Therefore, as systems are built that provide new functionality with new levels of usability, the expectations of users would shift so that the whole cycle should begin again.