Perspective-based Usability Inspection: An Empirical Validationof Efficacy

  • Authors:

  • Zhijun Zhang;Victor Basili;Ben Shneiderman

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science University of Maryland College Park, MD20742;Department of Computer Science University of Maryland College Park, MD20742;Department of Computer Science University of Maryland College Park, MD20742

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1999

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Inspection is a fundamental meansof achieving software usability. Past research showed that thecurrent usability inspection techniques were rather ineffective.We developed perspective-based usability inspection, which dividesthe large variety of usability issues along different perspectivesand focuses each inspection session on one perspective. We conducteda controlled experiment to study its effectiveness, using a post-testonly control group experimental design, with 24 professionalsas subjects. The control group used heuristic evaluation, whichis the most popular technique for usability inspection. The experimentaldesign and the results are presented, which show that inspectorsapplying perspective-based inspection not only found more usabilityproblems related to their assigned perspectives, but also foundmore overall problems. Perspective-based inspection was shownto be more effective for the aggregated results of multiple inspectors,finding about 30\% more usability problems for 3 inspectors.A management implication of this study is that assigning inspectorsmore specific responsibilities leads to higher performance. Internaland external threats to validity are discussed to help betterinterpret the results and to guide future empirical studies.