Integrated methods for a user adapted usability evaluation

For software development, methods must be able to effectively perform evaluations with respect to financial and time considerations. Usability evaluations are commonly performed to ensure software is usable. Most evaluations are individually performed, leading to some significant disadvantages. Although individual evaluations identify many usability problems, efficient modifications in terms of cost and development time are difficult. Additionally, usability problems in only specific perspectives are identified in individual usability evaluations. It is important to identify comprehensively usability problems in various perspectives. To improve these situations, the authors have proposed a method to automatically integrate various types of usability evaluations. Their method adds functions to record the operation histories of the target software. This information is then used to perform individual usability evaluations with an emphasis on usability categories, such as efficiency, errors, and learnability. Then the method integrates these individual evaluations to identify usability problems and subsequently prioritize these problems according to usability categories determined by the software developers and end users. Specifically, the authors' research focuses on employing automatic usability evaluations to identify problems. For example, they analyze the operation histories, but do not focus on manually performed evaluations such as heuristic ones. They assume their research can aid software developers and usability engineers because their work allows them to recognize the more serious problems. Consequently, the software can be modified to resolve the usability problems and better meet the end users' requirements. In the future, the authors strive to integrate more diverse usability evaluations, including heuristic evaluations, to refine integration capabilities, to identify problems in more detail, and to improve the effectiveness of the usability evaluations.