Where should usability techniques and HCD knowledge be considered in the existing software development lifecycle to maximize benefits gained from SE and HCD approaches? This book provides an integrative answer while proposing a systematic approach for the adoption, assessment and deployment of usability engineering methods within software development teams.
The proposed approach, called adoption-centric usability engineering (ACUE), provides a process to capture usability engineering methods together with a context profile. The context profile encodes human factors that contributed to acceptance or rejection of usability methods in past projects. This context-sensitive description of usability engineering is called a USEPack (Usability Engineering Experience Package).
Written for software developers, managers, educators and graduates from Academia and Industry, this book provides a complete, step-by-step approach for cost-effective integration of usability engineering methods in the software development lifecycle. TOC:Part I: Usabililty Engineering.- On Usability and Usability Engineering.- Usability Engineering Methods Plethora.- Pitfalls and Obstacles in the Integration and Adoption Path.- Part II: ACUE Fundamentals, Architecture and Components.- Usability Engineering Integration as an Adoption Problem.- ACUE Architecture and Components.- ACUE Formal Description.- Part III: Operationalization and Validation.- How Effective is ACUE? An Empirical Case Study.- Putting it into Practice: The ProUse Tool.- How Well Do ACUE and ProUse Work? Overall Evaluation.- Part IV: ACUE in Software Engineering: Current Stage and Perspectives.- ACUE and the Existing Software Engineering Methodologies.- Conclusion and Perspectives.- References.