Fuzzy Mathematical Measurement of Usability Data: A Healthcare Terminal PDA Case

Usability is an important measurement of software quality. Effective usability evaluation method and analysis technique on usability data always help to achieve high usability. A numerical measurement in usability evaluation can facilitate the comparison between different designs of product prototype. In this paper, we propose a simulation approach based on FSM to abstract the user interface rules according to the activities of real user, and present a fuzzy algorithm for measuring usability data on simulated FSM. In practice, we take a healthcare terminal PDA case into experiment, and illustrate how the approach is applied on the comparison between two different prototype-design-candidates of the PDA and resulted in two groups of data from the perspective of usability.