Specialization in Human-Computer Interaction at Uppsala University 2009 Listen to Your Users The Effect of Usability Evaluation on Software Development Practice

A vast majority of the people in the western world use software systems on daily basis for achieving their goals. To be able to do that each person needs to communicate what he or she wants to do to the system and receive a re-sponse. This communication needs to be easy for the user, especially when the system is new to him or her. Otherwise, the user either quits using the system; it takes a very long time or gets very irritated. A software team that is making new software needs to evaluate the usability of the system and various methods have been introduced in the literature to do that. My research focus in this thesis is on usability evaluation. I study particu-larly, how usability evaluation methods can be compared, what data should be gathered in usability evaluation to gain knowledge on how the software affects users who are getting new software for their daily work and how useful this data is to the recipients. Two experiments are reported in this thesis where results from using thre