The Interplay Between Interaction Design and Usability Evaluation

This research activity started in 2004. It is mainly conducted in a large research project, the USE project, with duration from 2005 to 2008, financed by a Danish research council.

This project aims to bridge the gap that currently exists between user interaction design and usability evaluation. The USE project includes two major activities: (a) exploring and investigating tools and techniques for extending feedback from usability evaluations beyond a mere listing of problems and (b) developing and evaluating our ideas for integration in industrial software development projects. The results of the project will be a catalogue of techniques and tools for usability evaluation and feedback with measures of impact on design that are empirically validated in industrial settings, documentation of relations between usability evaluation and feedback in industrial projects, integration of usability evaluation in software development in the participating companies, and courses, training programs and a conference for practitioners to disseminate the practical experience to the broader software industry.

This research has already produced some research publications, mainly in proceedings from international conferences. In addition, we have organized a workshop at an international conference. The PhD projects will be conducted in close collaboration with specific companies that develop interactive systems. It is expected that the project will impact these software organizations with new ways of conducting usability evaluations and integrating evaluation results in the interaction design activities.