A Systematic Mapping Study of Software Usability Studies

Abstract

Among software quality attributes “software usability” is considered as one of the vital factors in software engineering literature. Software usability is the ability for users to generally understand, use, and learn a software with ease. Due to the importance of usability in software quality, a considerable amount of literature is published in the past decade. Few review and survey studies are also published to critically review the existing literature in the domain. However, there is limited research covering systematic mapping study of software usability. Mapping studies help in analyzing the general trends and research productivity in a research area. To fill this gap, this work critically examines the overall research productivity, demographics, trends, and challenges of software usability. The objective is to classify the current contributions and trends in the area of software usability. We retrieved 9,874 research articles from six research databases and 62 works are selected as primary studies using an evidence-based approach. The result of this mapping study shows that software usability is an active research area, with a promising number of works published in the last decade (2011 - 2020). We identified that the current literature spans over multiple article classes of which investigative papers, model proposals and evaluation papers are the most frequently published article types. We found experiments and theoretical validations to be the most common validation techniques. In terms of application domains; web, software development and mobile applications are the most frequent domains where usability studies are conducted. We identified that future usability studies should focus more on field studies as well as on the usability testing of scientific software packages. It will be of importance to consider ethical issues in usability testing as well.