Direct integration: Training software developers and designers to conduct usability evaluations

Many improvements of the interplay between usability evaluation and software development rely either on better methods for conducting usability evaluations or on better formats for presenting evaluation results in ways that are useful for software designers and developers. Both approaches involve a complete division of work between developers and evaluators, which is an undesirable complexity for many software development projects. This paper takes a different approach by exploring to what extent software developers and designers can be trained to carry out their own usability evaluations. The paper is based on an empirical study where 36 teams with a total of 234 first-year university students on software development and design educations were trained in a simple approach for user-based website usability testing that was taught in a 40 hour course. This approach supported them in planning, conducting, and interpreting the results of a usability evaluation of an interactive website. They gained good competence in conducting the evaluation, defining task assignments and producing a usability report, while they were less successful in acquiring skills for identifying and describing usability problems.