Abstract
Three core themes are explored in eight papers:
Usability work as a human activity, usability practice
and methods, and persuasiveness of evaluation
results and feedback. We explore how usability
work is much more than methods and work
procedures, and argue that maturing our understanding
of usability work to include a human perspective,
is crucial to downstream utility—how
usability work impacts the on-going development
process. Our work shows that cross-professional
collaboration is subject to challenges that arise
from stakeholders having conflicting priorities,
procedures and personalities. Such challenges
include evaluation results lacking relevance, poor
timing of evaluation results, little respect for other
disciplines, and difficulties sharing important
information about a design. The studies of practical
usability work suggest that user researchers
working with computer games and task oriented
systems struggle with making methods meet practical
realities and demands, and that the concept
of usability in games is not satisfactorily covered
by for example the ISO 9241-11. With this in mind
we call for future work that broadens the concept
of usability to include concepts more relevant to
games—such as fun and aesthetics—and explores
evaluation methods that reflect such aspects. Our
focus on persuasiveness suggests that persuasiveness
is not an attribute of certain feedback
formats. We have conducted studies that suggest
how the act of being persuaded is dependent on
human aspects such as understanding, learning,
context and work relations. Consequently, we argue
that exploring how to organize usability work
to include human perspectives and support crossprofessional
learning is a huge—but crucial—future
challenge for work on downstream utility.
Usability work as a human activity, usability practice
and methods, and persuasiveness of evaluation
results and feedback. We explore how usability
work is much more than methods and work
procedures, and argue that maturing our understanding
of usability work to include a human perspective,
is crucial to downstream utility—how
usability work impacts the on-going development
process. Our work shows that cross-professional
collaboration is subject to challenges that arise
from stakeholders having conflicting priorities,
procedures and personalities. Such challenges
include evaluation results lacking relevance, poor
timing of evaluation results, little respect for other
disciplines, and difficulties sharing important
information about a design. The studies of practical
usability work suggest that user researchers
working with computer games and task oriented
systems struggle with making methods meet practical
realities and demands, and that the concept
of usability in games is not satisfactorily covered
by for example the ISO 9241-11. With this in mind
we call for future work that broadens the concept
of usability to include concepts more relevant to
games—such as fun and aesthetics—and explores
evaluation methods that reflect such aspects. Our
focus on persuasiveness suggests that persuasiveness
is not an attribute of certain feedback
formats. We have conducted studies that suggest
how the act of being persuaded is dependent on
human aspects such as understanding, learning,
context and work relations. Consequently, we argue
that exploring how to organize usability work
to include human perspectives and support crossprofessional
learning is a huge—but crucial—future
challenge for work on downstream utility.
| Original language | English |
|---|
| Place of Publication | København |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen |
| Number of pages | 108 |
| Publication status | Published - 2008 |