Usability Engineering & Software Engineering

In September 2003, a Workshop on Usability Engineering and Software Engineering took place at the "Mensch und Computer" conference in Stuttgart, Germany. The results include a position paper and a summary of the workshop discussions.

The IFIP working group on User Interface Engineering (WG 2.7 / 13.4) runs several activities on bridging the SE & HCI Communities. IFIP is the International Federation for Information Processing.

European research project STATUS (Software Architecture that supports Usability) has investigated how software architecture determines usability. The project homepage presents various project deliverables and publications.

A workshop at ICSE 2003 conference addressed the topic of "Bridging the Process and Practice Gaps Between Software Engineering and HCI".

Selected contributions to this workshop have also been published in a special issue of Software Process: Improvement and Practice.

Usability Engineering Resources

Resources on usability are legion. The following links focus particularly on aspects relevant to software engineering.

The Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) maintains an excellent site on usability and usability engineering. Also the German Chapter (GC-UPA) offers a quite comprehensive homepage.

Usability Net is a comprehensive resource center funded by the European Union to promote usability and user-centered design.

SAP Design Guild is a portal and forum that offers user interface design resources and other useful information in the UI field.

designforquality.com, a website of Eelke Folmer from University of Groningen, features information on software architecture that supports usability and maintainability.

Ergo-Online a website that offers a concise section on software usability (in German).

Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design for Programmers is a series of essays that wants to raise programmers' interest in UI issues.

Several usability experts and consultancy companies offer good collections of resources on usability and usability engineering, such as Nielsen Norman Group, the personal homepages of Jacob Nielsen (useit.com) and Don Norman (jnd.org), Usability First, Usability-Forum.com (in German), InContext Enterprises by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer, and forUse.com by Lucy A. D. Lockwood and Larry L. Constantine.

Professional associations on usability and usability engineering are the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA), its German Chapter GC-UPA, the IFIP working group on User Interface Engineering (WG 2.7 / 13.4), ACM SIGCHI, Fachbereich Mensch-Computer-Interaktion of the German Computer Society (GI), and its special interests group Fachgruppe Software-Ergonomie.

Usability Engineering Literature

Larry L. Constantine and Lucy A.D. Lockwood. Software for Use: A Practical Guide to the Models and Methods of Usage-Centered Design. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1999.

Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. Contextual Design. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 1998.

Donald A. Norman. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books, New York, NY, 1988.

Jacob Nielsen. Usability Engineering. Academic Press, Boston, MA, 1993.

Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp, David Benyon, Simon Holland, and Tom Carey. Human-Computer Interaction. Addison-Wesley, Wokingham, England, 1994.