What users say about software usability

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Abstract
This paper advances an amalgamated model of software usability derived from much of the vast research on the subject. The model organizes that research into seven basic usability principles, their underlying attributes, and associated relative weights. This model of software usability for human‐computer interaction has two primary goals: (a) to allow software designers to make quantitative decisions about which usability attributes should be included in a design, and (b) to provide a usability metric by which software designs can be consistently rated and compared. Because ultimately it is the users of a software system who decide how easy its user interface is to manipulate, 988 users were asked to evaluate the model's effectiveness. They were requested to rank the importance of each attribute in the model. Word processing was chosen as the specific interface type. To ensure some similarity in the respondents’ backgrounds, questionnaires were sent to users of a leading word processor. The 332 responses were analyzed to provide insights into what makes software usable and to provide a basis for adjusting the model. (Although many results of the study support our intuitions about what should be included in a user interface, for some reason, the developers of most software products do not seem to be heeding the obvious wisdom.) The paper also discusses the effect of user experience, presents extensions, and gives a summary of the findings that should be useful to those designing user interfaces and those selecting them.

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