The OBSTACLES and MYTHS of USABILITY and SOFTWARE ENGINEERING.

This article reports that during the past 15 years, the human-computer interaction community developed a large variety of user-centered design (UCD) techniques. However, these methods are still underused and difficult to understand by software development teams and organizations. This is because the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 47; no. 12; pp. 71 - 77
Main Authors: Seffah, Ahmed, Metzker, Eduard
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Dec2004
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: The OBSTACLES and MYTHS of USABILITY and SOFTWARE ENGINEERING.
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          Seffah, Ahmed
          Metzker, Eduard
        affil:
          Assistant Professor and the director of the Human-Centered Software Engineering group, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
          Member of the Department of Software Process Design, Software Technology Research Lab, Ulm, Germany.
      su:
        Human-computer interaction
        Software engineering
        Computer software development
        User interfaces
        Ergonomics
        Computer software developers
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        subj:
          Human-computer interaction
          Software engineering
          Computer software development
          User interfaces
          Ergonomics
          Computer software developers
      ab: This article reports that during the past 15 years, the human-computer interaction community developed a large variety of user-centered design (UCD) techniques. However, these methods are still underused and difficult to understand by software development teams and organizations. This is because these techniques have been developed independently from the software engineering community, which has its own techniques and tools for managing the software development life cycle, including usability concerns. Historically, UCD has been described as the opposite of the system-driven philosophy generally used in engineering. Unfortunately, even if software development teams largely recognize their appropriateness and powerfulness, UCD techniques remain the province of visionaries, isolated usability departments, enlightened software practitioners, and large organizations, rather than the everyday practice of software developers. One obstacle to the wider practice of UCD is that its structure and techniques are still relatively unknown, underused, difficult to master and essentially inaccessible to common developers and small and medium-sized software development teams.
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    language: English
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