Название: Software Usability Updates
Автор: Laura M. Castro
Издательство: ITexLi
Год: 2023
Страниц: 103
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.7 MB

This volume is a collection of high-quality contributions for developers and non-developers alike.

Beyond the preliminaries, the book is organized into two other parts: “Designing for Usability” and “Testing for Usability”. The chapters in the second section, “Designing for Usability”, offer valuable insights and practical guidance to take into account during the early stages of product conception and development. On the other hand, the chapters in the third section, “Testing for Usability”, reflect and formalize software usability’s evaluation and validation processes. These two complementary views on the subject make this book a balanced and comprehensive volume, which the reader will undoubtedly find both interesting and useful.

The ill effects of bad usability depend highly on the context and purpose for which software is used. Of course, there is no comparison between angry users that turns to other social networks or music streaming platforms, and the health-threatening consequences of usability failures. However, bad software usability might affect, as stated in the previous section, any field that uses software as a tool, even archaeology. While rating the severity of usability failures is a sensible afterward approach to what was not detected before, same as in software testing, the efforts that pay off the most are those aimed to prevent usability failures from happening in the first place. Something that cannot possibly be quantified is the harm done to the whole software development industry as a whole, and to the regard in which society holds technology and technology makers, when usability issues slip through to the final users, the regular citizens.

Quantities in engineering and the physical sciences are expressed as units of measurement (UoM). If a software system fails to maintain the algebraic attributes of a system’s UoM information correctly when evaluating expressions then disastrous problems can arise. However, it is perhaps the more mundane unit mismatches and lack of interoperability that over time incurs a greater cost. Global and existential challenges, from infectious diseases to environmental breakdown, require high-quality data. Ensuring software systems support quantities explicitly is becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity. While there are technical solutions that allow units of measurement to be specified at both the model and code level, a detailed assessment of their strengths and weaknesses has only recently been undertaken. This chapter provides both a formal introduction to managing quantities and a practical comparison of existing techniques so that software users can judge the robustness of their systems with regards to units of measurement.

Contents:
1. Why Usability Matters
2. Designing “Landing Page” for Websites Based on the User Experience: Review, Analysis, and Interpretation
3. Managing Quantities and Units of Measurement in Code Bases
4. Usability Testing Methods and Usability Laboratory Management
5. Usability Testing of Mixed Reality Scenarios: A Hands-on Report