Supporting Usability Engineering in Small Software Development Organizations

Despite an interest and use of different usability engineering methodssmall software development organizations find it challenging to implement usabilityengineering into the software development process. We present the resultsfrom a study about usability engineering in practice. Through a series of semistructured interviews we want to get an understanding of how usability is implemented into the organizations and how it’s practiced in reality. We foundthat the developers found it problematic to combine agile software developmentmethods with classic usability engineering methods. A lack of solid usabilityengineering expertise and not least experience seems to be a main obstacle for asuccessful implementation of usability engineering into current software development practices. They are requesting methods and procedures that fit better with their current practices and strategies to implement usability engineering into the organizations.Despite an interest and use of different usability engineering methodssmall software development organizations find it challenging to implement usabilityengineering into the software development process. We present the results from a study about usability engineering in practice. Through a series of semistructured interviews we want to get an understanding of how usability is implemented into the organizations and how it’s practiced in reality. We found that the developers found it problematic to combine agile software developmentmethods with classic usability engineering methods. A lack of solid usability engineering expertise and not least experience seems to be a main obstacle for asuccessful implementation of usability engineering into current software development practices. They are requesting methods and procedures that fit better with their current practices and strategies to implement usability engineering into the organizations