Special Issue on Usability Engineering

Empirical Software Engineering: An International Journal Kluwer Academic Publishers

Editors in Chief: Victor R. Basili and Warren Harrison

This Special Issue on Usability Engineering will appear in early 1999 and is meant to build a bridge between the software engineering and the human-computer interaction research communities. Usability engineering is emerging as the commercial and practical discipline that incorporates participatory design, rapid prototyping, and iterative evaluation.

User-centered design and usability evaluations have become common practices in many organizations, but they are still novel and typical development cycles do not accommodate these practices. Wide spread inclusion of usability engineering methods in development would be fostered by empirical studies validating these methods and case studies addressing cost/benefit issues.

We seek papers describing empirical studies, field studies or cases studies of topics such as: Design

• Frameworks and methodologies for user interface design and development
• Incorporation of usability engineering into software engineering lifecycles
• Novel methods for obtaining user requirements
• Cost- benefit analysis of usability engineering methods
• Use of existing data from other domains (sociological, demographic, market analysis; cognitive and social psychology) in product design and evaluation
• Use of field research methods in product design
• International and cross-cultural software engineering

Testing and Reviews

• Evaluation of strategies for expert reviews and usability testing
• Utility of preference vs. performance measures
• Validation of surveys and metrics
• Web-based remote usability testing

Special Issue Editors:

Jean Scholtz and Ben Shneiderman

Submit papers by 10 July 1998 to:

Jean Scholtz, Ph.D.
NIST Building 225, Room 216
Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA

Notification with reviews will be by August 31 and the revised version will be due on 30 October 1998.