Book review: Usability Inspection Methods edited by Jakob Nielsen and Robert L. Mack (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994)

Abstract

In recent years, organizations have become more and more concerned with the concept of "usability," the ease with which customers will be able to employ an artifact, be it a computer program or a voice mail system. Usability Inspection is a rapidly growing science concerned with developing tools and techniques for identifying potential problems that will face customers using the artifact during the design process, rather than discovering them after the product has gone to market. This edited volume fills an important niche, by describing a variety of methods employed by usability engineers and comparing their effectiveness. The editors planned the volume, which arose out of a CHI 1992 workshop, to be used as a primer for students or user interface practitioners. Many of the chapters are very useful for this purpose, however the book as a whole is somewhat redundant, and some of the contributions are too vague to be of much value to a novice in the field.