Cost-benefit model justifying the importance of addressing usability problems.

Abstract

Usability involves optimizing the human interaction with interactive products to enable them to carry out their activities in their everyday life. Usability does not exist in any absolute sense; it can only be defined with reference to particular contexts. This, in turn, means that there are no absolute measures of usability, since, if the usability of an artifact is defined by the context in which that artifact is used, measures of usability must of necessity be defined by that context too. Despite this, there is a need for broad general measures which can be used to compare usability across a range of contexts. In addition, there is a need for "quick and dirty" methods to allow low cost assessments of usability in industrial systems evaluation. It is set to achieve effectiveness, efficiency, safety, good utility, learnability and memorability in the context of use. However, there is always a challenge to show the inherent lightness of usability, more so in demonstrating the objectively and explicitly of its value. Hence, there are not many organizations that integrate usability activities as an integral part of their product development projects as the benefits of better usability are not visible for the management.