Tool-supported usability engineering for continuous user analysis

Abstract

There is a large set of methods and measures to strengthen the usability of interactive products; however the practical application of usability engineering still seems to be difficult and is not practiced widely. As main problems we identified a low level of guidance, insufficient flexibility of methods and lack of awareness of results within the project team. We will discuss these problems and present a new approach of performing usability engineering in practice as collection of easy to handle tools that can be combined and integrated throughout the whole development process. The contribution places particular attention to the area of user analysis and how to support this important aspect of software development within our system Usability Engineering Repository (UsER).