Usability goals

Discussion articles

• Accessibility in the analysis phase
  It is most effective and efficient to incorporate accessibility from the very beginning of a project. When accessibility is only addressed late in product design, it can be very costly to make required design changes. Incorporating accessibility early in the project increases the potential positive design impact, and decreases the time and money required to design accessible products. This chapter provides information on setting usability goals, user analysis, workflow analysis and understanding accessibility issues.

• Performance requirements
  I will bet most people reading have never written a usability objective before. I envy you. I get why it is done. You want to design a system that allows you to measure it, thereby defining the level of quality. And everyone loves quality. So to measure something, you need a goal to meet in the first place. And to be on the up-and-up, that goal needs to be stated before you build.
  (Matthew Oliphant)

• Setting usability requirements
  There are always various usability goals for any system development effort. Some of these are known on beforehand, easy to state and to verify. Some of them don’t appear until we learn more about the problem domain, as work proceeds. Some of them may, at a first glance, seem quite impossible to specify and to verify.

• The art of usability benchmarking
  One common concern raised by managers and engineers alike is this: how usable is enough? This question, and the absence of an easy answer, is often the first defense people offer against investing in usability and ease of use. The smart usability engineer or designer has at least one response: the usability benchmark. By capturing the current level of ease of use of the current product or website, a reference point is created that can be measured against in the future. It doesn't answer the question of how usable is enough, but if the benchmark is done properly, it does enable someone to set goals and expectations around ease of use for the future.

• Usability requirements: how to specify, test and report usability
  This web site provides a guide for how to specify, test and report usability requirements as part of a contractual relationship between a supplier and acquirer. It includes case studies of four trials carried out in Europe by the EU-funded PRUE project.