The Future of Usability Evaluation: Increasing Impact on Value

Abstract

What does the future of usability evaluation hold? To gain insights for the future, this chapter first surveys past and current usability practices, including laboratory usability testing, heuristic evaluation, methods with roots in anthropol- ogy (such as contextual inquiry and ethnographic research), rapid iterative testing, benchmarking with large population samples, and multiple-method usability pro- grams. Such consideration has several benefits, because both individual usability practitioners and organizations have attained different levels of usability sophisti- cation and maturity. Usability evaluation methods long employed by major corpo- rations may still be in the future for smaller or younger organizations. The chapter begins by discussing 20th-century usability evaluation, continues with an overview of usability evaluation today, and concludes with a discussion of what to expect in usability evaluation over the next years. For each period in the history—and future—of usability evaluation, the chapter addresses how its impact on software value is increasing.