An Economical Approach to Usability Testing

Many software engineers consider usability testing as one of the more expensive, tedious and least rewarding tests to implement. Making usability testing less expensive and more rewarding requires having results that pinpoint issues in the software and do not require expensive consultants and facilities. To accomplish these goals this paper presents a novel way of measuring software usability and an approach to designing usability tests that does not require external consultants or expensive laboratory facilities. The usability testing approach discussed in this paper also permits testing earlier in the development process. One of the key elements to this technique is the use of traditional testing concepts and techniques such as scenario based testing to measure productivity and learnability of the subject. By constructing test cases or tasks to measure the learnability of the application, the developer has a way to measure the quality of both the test and the software.