Usability evaluation in task orientated collaborative environments

Abstract

An evaluation of the usability is often neglected in the software development cycle, even that it was shown in the past that a careful look at the usability of a software product has impact on its adoption. With the recent arising of software supporting collaboration between multiple users, it is obvious that usability testing will get more complex because of the multiplication of user interfaces and their physical distribution. The need for new usability testing methodologies and tools for their support under these circumstances is one consequence. This paper widens the methodologies of usability evaluation to computing systems supporting the solving of a collaborative work task. Additionally details of a distributed screen recording tool are described that can be used to support usability evaluation in a collaborative context. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.