This commentary discusses Noam Tractinsky’s article “The Usability Construct: A Dead End?” (Human–Computer Interaction, 2017). That article debates the conceptual qualities of “usability” as a key concept in human–computer interaction. It provides two main conclusions: (a) the usefulness of the concept of “usability” to human–computer interaction theories has been limited and (b) a notion of “construct” is useful for identifying weaknesses of the concept of “usability” and thereby provides reasons for its limited usefulness. The article is interesting and provides an in-depth analysis of the concept of usability. Unfortunately, the use of this analysis is not convincing. Instead, redefinition of “usability” should be based on a constructive approach.

Usability evaluations provide software development teams with insights on the degree to which a software application enables a user to achieve his/her goals, how fast these goals can be achieved, how easy it is to learn and how satisfactory it is in use. Although usability evaluations are crucial in the process of developing software systems with a high level of usability, their use is still limited in the context of small software development companies. Several approaches have been proposed to support software development practitioners (SWPs) in conducting usability evaluations and this paper presents two in-depth empirical studies of supporting SWPs by training them to become barefoot usability evaluators. Findings show that the SWPs after 30 hours of training obtained considerable abilities in identifying usability problems and that this approach revealed a high level of downstream utility. Results also show that the SWPs created relaxed conditions for the test users when acting as test monitors but experienced problems with making users think aloud. Considering the quality of problem descriptions, we found that the SWPs were better at providing clear and precise problem descriptions than at describing the impact, cause, user actions and providing data support for observations.

Remote asynchronous usability testing involves users directly in reporting usability problems. Most studies of this approach employ predefined tasks to ensure that users experience specific aspects of the system, whereas other studies use no task assignments. Yet the effect of using predefined tasks is still to be uncovered. There is also limited research on instructions for users in identifying usability problems. This paper reports from a comparative study of the effect of task assignments and instruction types on the problems identified in remote asynchronous usability testing of a website for information retrieval, involving 53 prospective users. The results show that users solving predefined tasks identified significantly more usability problems with a significantly higher level of agreement than those working on their own authentic tasks. Moreover, users that were instructed by means of examples of usability problems identified significantly more usability problems than those who received a conceptual definition of usability problems.

Many efforts to improve the interplay between usability evaluation and software development rely either on better methods for conducting usability evaluations or on better formats for presenting evaluation results in ways that are useful for software designers and developers. Both of these approaches depend on a complete division of work between developers and evaluators. This article takes a different approach by exploring whether software developers and designers can be trained to conduct their own usability evaluations. The article is based on an empirical study where 36 teams with a total of 234 first-year university students on software development and design educations were trained through an introductory course in user-based website usability testing that was taught in 40 h. They used the techniques from this course for planning, conducting, and interpreting the results of a usability evaluation of an interactive website. They gained good competence in conducting the evaluation, defining user tasks and producing a usability report, while they were less successful in acquiring skills for identifying and describing usability problems.

Remote asynchronous usability testing is characterized by both a spatial and temporal separation of users and evaluators. This has the potential both to reduce practical problems with securing user attendance and to allow direct involvement of users in usability testing. In this paper, we report from an empirical study where we systematically compared three methods for remote asynchronous usability testing: user-reported critical incidents, forum-based online reporting and discussion, and diary-based longitudinal user reporting. In addition, conventional laboratory-based think-aloud testing was included as a benchmark for the remote methods. The results show that each remote asynchronous method supports identification of a considerable number of usability problems. Although this is only about half of the problems identified with the conventional method, it requires significantly less time. This makes remote asynchronous methods an appealing possibility for usability testing in many software projects.

The idea of conducting usability tests remotely emerged ten years ago. Since then, it has been studied empirically, and some software organizations employ remote methods. Yet there are still few comparisons involving more than one remote method. This paper presents results from a systematic empirical comparison of three methods for remote usability testing and a conventional laboratory-based think-aloud method. The three remote methods are a remote synchronous condition, where testing is conducted in real time but the test monitor is separated spatially from the test subjects, and two remote asynchronous conditions, where the test monitor and the test subjects are separated both spatially and temporally. The results show that the remote synchronous method is virtually equivalent to the conventional method. Thereby, it has the potential to conveniently involve broader user groups in usability testing and support new development approaches. The asynchronous methods are considerably more time-consuming for the test subjects and identify fewer usability problems, yet they may still be worthwhile.

A usability evaluation provides a strong and rich basis for understanding and improving the design of user interaction with a software system. Exploiting this evaluation requires feedback that significantly impacts the developers' understanding of usability data about the interaction design of the system. This article presents results from an exploratory study of 2 ways of providing feedback from a usability evaluation: observation of user tests and reading usability reports. A case study and a field experiment were used to explore how observation and usability reports impact developers' understanding of usability data. The results indicate that observation of user tests facilitated a rich understanding of usability problems and created empathy with the users and their work. The usability report had a strong impact on the developers' understanding of specific usability problems and supported a systematic approach to deal effectively with problems.

Usability evaluations inform user interaction design in a relevant manner, and successful user interaction design can be attained through usability evaluation. These are obvious conjectures about a mature usability engineering discipline. Unfortunately, research and practice suggest that, in reality, the interplay between usability evaluation and user interaction design is significantly more complex and too often far from optimal. This article provides a simple model of the interplay between usability evaluation and user interaction design that captures their main relationships. From the model, what is seen as the key challenges in improving the interplay between evaluation and design is outlined. The intention is to create a background against which the remainder of this special issue, containing5researcharticlespresenting empirical data on the interplay between design and evaluation and a commentary, can be contrasted.

Communication between physically distributed people in industrial and safety-critical domains is often spoken and mediated through walkie-talkies, or closed-circuit intercoms.Because this kind of communication is hampered by noise, radio interference, lack of persistency, etc. vital information is sometimes lost.In response to this challenge, this paper discusses the use of 'canned' text-based messaging as a supplement for improving such communication.Based on data from ethnographic studies of work activities in an industrial domain, and grounded in a theoretical model of communication, we have designed and evaluated a mobile canned communication prototype system facilitating exchange of predefined text messages, a persistent graphical representation of the operation in progress, and a filtered list of completed tasks.Results from two evaluations show that in the domain considered, canned text-based communication has a potential to supplement voice and assist in overcoming some of the inherent problems of spoken communication.Yet using a textual and persistent mode of communication also raises new challenges such as choice of modality, speed, flexibility and handling situations deviating from standard procedures.