When should usability techniques be considered during the software development lifecycle in order to create a user-friendly software program? This book provides an integrative answer by proposing adoption-centric usability engineering (ACUE), a systematic process for the adoption, assessment, and deployment of usability engineering methods. As part of the process, a context profile is developed, which encodes human factors that contributed to acceptance or rejection of usability methods in past projects. This context-sensitive description of usability engineering is called a USEPack (Usability Engineering Experience Package). Written for software developers, managers, educators, and graduate-level students, this book provides a complete, step-by-step approach for cost-effective integration of usability engineering methods into the software development lifecycle.

Usability Engineering: Definitions, Methods, and Challenges for Integration.- On Usability and Usability Engineering.- Usability Engineering Methods Plethora.- Pitfalls and Obstacles in the Integration and Adoption Path.- ACUE Fundamentals, Architecture and Components.- Usability Engineering Integration as an Adoption Problem.- ACUE Architecture and Components.- ACUE Formal Description.- Operationalization and Validation.- How Effective Is ACUE? An Empirical Case Study.- Putting it into Practice: The ProUse Tool.- How Well do ACUE and ProUse Work? Overall Evaluation.- ACUE in Software Engineering: Current Stage and Perspectives.- ACUE and the Existing Software Engineering Methodologies.- Conclusion and Perspectives.

Developing software systems which are easy to use while simultaneously increasing the productivity, performance and satisfaction of users is still a major challenge in software engineering. Thus a large number of usability engineering methods have been proposed to systematically develop software with high usability. A large number of studies indicate that even basic usability engineering methods are not integrated in software development lifecycles practiced in industrial settings. Yet problems in the adoption of methods by project teams are rarely examined. This book provides a new perspective on the integration and adoption of usability engineering methods by software development teams. The adoption of methods by project teams - contrary to popular belief - is not assured just because it is mandated by the organization. This work argues that usability engineering methods can only be regarded as integrated in the software development process of an organization when these methods are practiced and accepted by development teams. So far no frameworks for examining the acceptance of methods by project teams and for exploiting such data for guiding project teams in method deployment are available. To address this problem, this book presents an approach which consists of a process meta-model for guiding project teams in the deployment of usability en- neering methods and a measurement framework for measuring the acceptance of the deployed methods. The approach is called Adoption-Centric Usability Engineering.