ABSTRACT
This chapter presents various aspects of usability engineering life-cycle stages and important associated areas. It covers usability engineering life-cycle stages, fundamental features of design for usability and usability-related actions during system design phases, usability-related myths and factors affecting usability within organizations, nonfunctional system development project requirements and their impact on usability and usability performance measures, usability advantages, and problems. The usability engineering life cycle is divided into 11 stages, and each stage is discussed in detail. These stages are (1) knowing about all potential users, (2) carrying out competitive analysis, (3) establishing appropriate usability goals, (4) carrying out parallel designs, (5) carrying out participatory design, (6) coordinating the entire user interface, (7) applying guidelines, (8) prototyping, (9) carrying out interface evaluation, (10) performing iterative design, and (11) obtaining data from actual field applications. There are 10 problems at the end of the chapter to test readers’ comprehension in the area, and the sources of most of the material presented in the chapter are given in a reference list. This will be useful to readers if they desire to delve more deeply into a specific area.
