Formulating Usability Harold Thimbleby Abstract Usability is empirical, and often highly context-specific, but it would be useful for designers to have general estimates of usability from interactive system specifications alone. We discuss how this problem may be approached, and we give examples. We also discuss the justification for the approach, since it is unusual to measure usability without involving users. The explicit mathematical content of this paper has been deliberately kept to a minimum. 1 Introduction A tool supporting the sort of analysis promoted here is discussed in a companion paper with a more practical emphasis (Thimbleby, 1993); 1 related work includes (Thimbleby, 1991; Thimbleby & Witten, 1993). 1.1 Empirical Usability The quality of a system depends on it meeting various criteria, which are traditionally vague and non-constructive in design: usability is "the degree" to which specified users can achieve specified goals in specified environments, subject to various comfort, effectiveness, efficiency, and acceptability criteria (Shackel, 1986). Shackel's influential definition suggests terms should be given numerical values; designing for usability has recently become called 'usability engineering,' almost lending an 'engineering' status to any such numbers! But suppose only 64% of users can use a system "acceptably", when 70% was
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Formulating usability
Thimbleby, Harold
Follow ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
, Volume 26 (2)
Association for Computing Machinery – Apr 1, 1994
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