F12 – 1002: Evaluating and Improving Usability

Track: Test Strategy, Process and Design

Today’s web-based applications (WebApps) containing complex business logic and sometimes critical to operating the business, now must have an increased focus on usability as well as the newer and broader term, user experience. Now, mobile apps are following their lead and are gaining more and more sophisticated functionality even with limited screen real estate. This has led to both usability and user experience becoming paramount as there is no up-front investment forcing a user to stay. Even though usability has some formal ISO model definitions, there are no models or formal definitions for user experience, nor its relation to usability. For usability, ISO provides general guidelines but lacks implementation specifics. UX, on the other hand, does not have any formal standard definition, although some models have been developed regarding its elements. Models and research have been used mostly for the purpose of understanding, rather than evaluating and improving. In this talk, we draw relationships between usability and user experience and discuss measurement and evaluation methods that can be used as the first step toward improvement. Specific measurements are shared in a case study.

Session Takeaways:

  • Understand usability and develop a usability model
  • Understand why it is important and how it impacts user acceptance
  • Methodology for continuous usability improvement
  • Practical measurements
  • Learn how one organization conducted usability testing via a case study
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Session Speaker:

Philip LewPhilip Lew – CEO, XBOSoft
Mr. Lew guides XBOSoft’s overall strategy and operations. He is an Adjunct Professor at Alaska Pacific University and the Project Management College teaching graduate courses in software engineering, IT project management, and IT Governance. Mr. Lew has presented at several conferences including Int’l. Conf. on Web Engineering, Int’l. Conf. on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology and Int’l. Conf. on Software and systems process analysis on web application usability, quality processes and quality evaluation. He has been published in numerous academic journals as well as Project Management Technology, Network World, Telecommunications Magazine, Call Center Magazine, TeleProfessional, and DataPro Research Reports. He received his B.S. and Master of Engineering degrees in Operations Research from Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from Beihang University where his research focused on software usability and quality evaluation. His research areas are currently focused on measuring user experience and software learnability. In the past 20 years, he has helped hundreds of organizations assess the quality of their software, examine software quality processes and set forth measurement plans so that they can consistently improve software quality using systematic methods.