usability engineering: How
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The Usability Engineering Lifecycle
Flowchart of The Usability Engineering Lifecycle
Dr. Mayhew is particularly well known for a unique and highly effective structured methodology for achieving usability during software application and web site development that she has developed over many years of experience, and documented in a well-known book. This methodology is called "The Usability Engineering Lifecycle". Dr. Mayhew teaches this methodology through formal training classes, and/or by directing and coaching project teams as they apply the methodology during software or web site development projects. The methodology represents an engineering approach to achieving usability during design and development which includes:
  • Structured usability requirements analysis tasks
  • An explicit usability goal setting task, driven directly by requirements analysis data
  • Tasks supporting a structured, top-down approach to user interface design that is driven directly from usability goals and other requirements data
  • Objective usability evaluation tasks for iterating towards usability goals

We can introduce The Usability Engineering Lifecycle to your development organization and tailor it to integrate with your unique application or web site development methodology.

Above is a schematic representing The Usability Engineering Lifecycle. It indicates all lifecycle tasks, and approximately where each one should be applied within either a modern rapid prototyping - or an Object Oriented - software engineering methodology. it shows how Usability Engineering Lifecycle tasks occur in parallel with traditional development tasks and are tighlty intertwined with them.

There are a variety of techniques available for conducting each lifecycle task. The basic Usability Engineering Lifecycle can be expanded or contracted and otherwise adapted to accommodate large, complex development projects, small scale development projects (such as simple Web sites), or anything in between, through the selection of specific techniques for each lifecycle task.