A Survey on Usability Evaluation Techniques and an Analysis of their actual Application
Martina Freiberg, Joachim Baumeister · 2008
Today, software products for nearly every possible purpose exist. Most of them enable users to accomplish their tasks somehow, yet often they do not support them in doing so. In many cases this is either due to the complex design of the software interfaces, or to a poorly designed underlying task model, leading to time-consuming procedures. This is why interface design, especially in terms of ergonomics and usability, is still a fruitful field of research, providing many topics of interest for applied scientific works as, for example, Ph.D. dissertations. Likewise growing is the field of interface and usability evaluation, already providing a large number of different techniques. This raises the need for a comprehensive categorization of the techniques. Another interesting research question is, which techniques are actually usable and have been applied in the context of scientific theses so far. This research report contributes to these topics in providing an extensive, categorized overview of usability evaluation techniques, and furthermore by reporting the results of the analysis of their actual application in the named context. Therefore, the relevant literature was reviewed and various Ph.D. and MA theses from computer science and strongly related