A Semi-automatic Usability Evaluation Framework

Most of the software maintenance costs come from usability bugs reported after the release and deployment. A usability bug is really subjective, hence there is a large communication overhead between the end user and the developer. Moreover, the reputation of the software development company could be decreased as well. Therefore, proactively testing and maintaining software systems from a usability point of view is unambiguously beneficial. In this paper we propose a research prototype, the Usability Evaluation Framework. The development of the framework is driven by welldefined requirements. It is built upon a usability model, it calculates usability metrics, it integrates questionnaires and it also ensures several meaningful reports. We have successfully applied the framework to evaluate and to improve the usability of two industrial software systems.