A Development and Application of the Checklist for Evaluating Software Usability

소프트웨어 사용성 평가를 위한 체크리스트의 개발과 적용

Usability is defined by the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goal in particular environment. Today, many factors such as software acquisition, business re-engineering and the trend of software market have software industry considers usability as an important quality of software products. Therefore, the specification and measurement method for establishing the acceptable usability level of software is required during software development acquisition and evaluation. To evaluate whether software products is usable or not, we need evaluation method for software usability. This paper is not only to provide a framework for specifying the usability attributes of a product and establishing a comprehensive set of usability criteria, but also assessing usability metrics of the software. The usability metrics and checklist is developed based on the properties of the user interface using ISO standard and general usability principles with product-oriented view which means the Product has attributes contributing to determine the usability. This paper also suggested the way to weight the relative importance of the individual usability item depending on the software categories.