Usability reporting with UsabML

Abstract

Usability practitioners conduct formative evaluations, such as heuristic evaluations and thinking aloud tests, to identify potential problems in a user interface as part of the iterative design cycle. The findings of a formative evaluation (in essence, a list of potential problems) are usually compiled into written reports and typically delivered as a PDF or Word document. A written report is convenient for reading, but makes it difficult to reuse the findings electronically. The usability markup language (UsabML) defines a structured reporting format for the results of usability evaluations. In agile software development the direct handover of usability findings to software engineers can speed up development cycles and improve software quality. Usability managers can now enter the findings of formative evaluations into a new, web-based system called Usability Reporting Manager (URM). Findings can be exported in UsabML format, which in turn can easily be imported by software engineers into an issue-tracking system connected to a source code repository. UsabML can also be transformed into other formats such as HTML and PDF via stylesheets (XSL). © 2012 Springer-Verlag.