Usability engineering in the wild: How do practitioners integrate usability engineering in software development?

Abstract

It has been argued that too much research on usability engineering is incoherent with the processes, and settings being the realities for practitioners. In this paper we want to extend the existing knowledge about usability engineering in the wild. Through 12 semi-structured interviews we wanted to get an understanding of how usability is perceived, and practiced in reality. We found that our participants primarily focus on upfront work to support the design, and implementation process. They implement usability engineering through informal evaluations, and by following a set of local de facto standards. We want to extend the existing body of knowledge about usability engineering in practice, to support the development of methods aimed at practitioners.