Training Software Developers in Usability Engineering: A Literature Review

Software companies focusing on Usability Engineering face two major challenges, the first being the sheer lack of usability specialists leading to missing competences in the industry and the second, which regards small companies suffering from the constraint of low budgets, thus not being able to fund usability specialists or comprehensive consultancy. Training of non-usability personnel in critical usability engineering methods has the potential of easing these challenges. It is, however, unknown how much and what kind of research that has been committed to novice training in UE methods. This paper presents a comprehensive literature study of research conducted in this area, where 129 papers are analyzed in terms of research focus, empirical basis, types of training participants and training costs. Findings show a need for further empirical research regarding long term effects of training, training costs and training in user based evaluation methods.