2. The Trouble With Usability Engineering?
• Nitpicky feedback
• Usability engineer finds fault with aspects of
interface whose influence seems marginal at
best
• Tons of paper
• Tons of paper that end up „dead“ on shelves
3. The Trouble With Usability Engineering?
• “Creative” ideas that are never be implemented
• Interesting on paper but cannot be implemented
due to hard technical constraints/requirements
• Delays due to necessity of creating prototypes for
usability testing purposes
• Prototypes that have been developed specifically
for usability testing cannot be reused for „real“
development
4. Current Issues in IT
• Green IT
• Users can also help in saving power: by using computers more
efficiently.
• Highly specialized tools
• To create these tools, the user-work-tool fit has to be
understood exactly
• Ubiquitous computing
• For market success, it is of paramount importance giving users
exactly what they want. In their everyday context, users are less
likely to adapt to technology than in “artificial” work settings.
5. Usability engineering is not about providing
„added value“, it‘s about getting today‘s basics
right!
6. Agile Usability Engineering
• Adapt usability engineering approaches to the concrete project phase
• The degree of being user-driven and being technologically-driven
varies throughout a project
• Targeted communication
• Instead of having bloated documentation, give the respective
audience what it needs for immediate use – nothing more,
nothing less
• Re-use prototypes
• Instead of generating throwaway code, generate code that can be
used for testing and implementation without overhead
