IMPETUS / HOW PROJECT BEGAN: It is becoming increasingly apparent that the success or failure of software products and web sites often hinges as much on ease of use as on pure functionality. Usability in software contributes directly to lowered cost and increased productivity. In the case of web sites, usability is a critical issue for an increasingly competitive electronic commerce market as well as intranets/extranets sites. The usability engineering effort in the ITL began with a series of symposia to government personnel, but now has grown into a research project aimed at improving the usability of web sites through research in this arena and the development of tools based on the research to improve usability. We are also spearheading an industry effort to develop methods for incorporating usability into procurement decision in the form of an ongoing series of workshops.

Objective: The overall goal is to promote the incorporation of usability into software products as a normal part of design and development. Specifically, the Industry Usability Workshop (IUW) is introducing the notion of usability into the procurement decisions of industries who regularly purchase COTS software and developed a report format for specifying product usability tests. The Government Systems Symposia are aimed at incorporating usability engineering techniques into the government system design and development process. WebMetrics focuses on helping usability engineers and web site developers evaluate the accessibility and usability of web sites through tools that support rapid, remote, and automated evaluation.

Impact: The Usability Engineering and WebMetrics project has had impact on two fronts. First, the Industry Usability Workshop, with its goal of developing a common usability report format to improve the procurement of software by introducing information about usability testing of products, has had participants from many major software consumers and producers. These include: Microsoft, Oracle, Fidelity, Boeing, PeopleSoft, Lucent, Serco Usability Services, PC Computing Magazine, Northwestern Mutual Life, GSA, System Concepts Limited, Compaq, Trilogy, ARI, SBC Technology Resources, Intel, HP, IBM, Cognetics, Lotus, USWest, State Farm, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Apple, Redish&Associates, Sun, Kodak, SEI, and Bellcore, all of who have contributed to draft white papers for the format and a pilot testing program. Second, the WebMetrics software has been downloaded over 1200 times - 30% of these were commercial sites; several companies/consultants have been successfully using this software. We are working with IEEE Computer Society to modify the tools to support the IEEE P2001 draft on recommended practice for Web page engineering. We expect that, not only will WebMetrics educate many of those just getting started in e-commerce as to the benefits of usability, but eventually these best practices for usability will be incorporated directly in web development tools.

ARTIFACTS:

• Information on the Usability Engineering for Government Systems Symposia
• The WebMetrics site
• The 5th Conference on Human Factors and the Web site

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