Usability Evaluation of Mobile Phone Applications

Conference Plenary at STeP-IN Theme Conference: Usability Testing & Engineering (May 2006)
Harsha B. N - Senior Testing Engineer & Shrinivas S H - Software Engineer, Nokia India Pvt. Ltd

In recent years Usability or user experience of the product has emerged as one of the key elements of market success.For the product to be successful in the competitive market it should be user friendly. Usability evaluation has proven to be an invaluable tool for assessing usability of the product based on user mistakes and satisfaction.Usability evaluation of the systems for stationary computer has grown to be an established discipline with different methods and techniques and has empirically documented experience with their use.

My encounter and interaction with "Usability"

Conference Plenary – a STeP-IN Theme Conference: Usability Testing & Engineering (May 2006)
Vivek S. Buzruk - Head, Government and Cluster Business, IBM Rational Software

What is important for successful Software? During the early days of development, UNIX was our real favorite. As a Unix user and more than that, a developer of compilation system, writing the filters on the command line, using "find" command or even ":" command of "vi", etc. was a way of life. I’m not sure what made us more comfortable - whether it was the functionality of Unix or was it the way OS/file-system usability extended to the OS-user. During this period a few Windows-based development environments started appearing; one of the early ones was UCSD Pascal. Later there were many more. But my real next interaction with Usability was through Rational Apex.

Testing User Interaction Design Maturity of Software Solutions

While business system complexities are increasing, improvements in the end user productivity for any software system are becoming more important than ever. It is no longer enough to deliver the products or software systems that are merely functional or barely usable. Technological excellence alone may not win user acceptance or guarantee marketability, either. The User Experience, or how the user experiences the end product, is the key to acceptance. User Interaction (UI) of the products/solutions/systems needs to be really appealing and desirable.

The paper discusses how we can define the UI Design Maturity and how we can measure it. We address how to quantitatively assess maturity of UI designs and define the process of User-Centric Design to deliver desired level of maturity. We can then measure and verify the maturity of the developed system and correlate the cost of developing usable system to the desired level of UI maturity. Correlating the UI maturity to the cost and how to estimate cost for desired level of maturity, is a topic of separate discussion.

Paper Presentation – at STeP-IN SUMMIT 2007(January 2007)
Rajiv Deo, Head - Delivery, Innovation and Knowledge Management, Patni Computer Systems Ltd

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Speaker Background

Rajiv B Deo Rajiv has over 20 years of rich experience in almost every facet of information technology business. Rajiv uses his in-depth experiential knowledge in IT as well as in Manufacturing, Finance and Healthcare domains for evolving better quality processes and competitive strategies for higher customer satisfaction.

After completing BTech from IIT, Bombay in 1976, Rajiv chose to do his MTech in Industrial Engineering & Operations Research at IIT Bombay in 1977. Rajiv is also a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) from ISACA USA.

Since 2004, Rajiv and his team at Patni are engaged in a mission to take Software Engineering Practice to the next pragmatic level.

Integrating Usability in the Product Engineering Process

Conference Plenary at STeP-IN Theme conference: Usability Testing & Engineering (May 2006)
Muralidhar Koteshwar, Head – Tools and Competency Development, Celstream Technologies.

As competition in the software products and solutions marketplace hots up, Usability can be a key product differentiator that can make or break the product. In most cases of product development, Usability is an afterthought and recommendations are either not taken up in the first release or can prove costly and affect schedule when changes are incorporated too late in the software development lifecycle. Experts worldwide recommend integrating Usability at various stages within the Product Development Lifecycle. This talk will take the audience through the benefits of doing so and provide some practical insight into Usability Engineering.