Testing the Unknown – Value of Usability Testing for Complex Professional Systems Development




Kimmo Tarkkanen, Ville Harkke, Pekka Reijonen

J. Abascal, Simone Barbosa, Mirko Fetter, Tom Gross, Philippe Palanque, Marco Winckler

IFIP TC.13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

2015

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2015

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

9297

9297

300

314

15

978-3-319-22667-5

978-3-319-22668-2

0302-9743

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22668-2_24



To make an impact on the design in usability testing, the test tasks are essential ingredients for the early system development process. Complex design problems are not solved by focusing on the details of a prototype and setting the scope on what is already known by the design team. Instead, the design value of usability testing is increased by deliberately relinquishing the assumptions made and implemented into a design. In the development of complex systems, usability testing with  extended scope and open-ended structure, as presented in this paper with three empirical cases, delivers not only specific knowledge about the user interactions with the system, but reveals issues that, despite rigorous user research efforts, have been overlooked in the preceding phases of system development. Therefore, we suggest applying open-ended usability test tasks for testing systems in complex settings such as in the development of health care systems.



Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 17:58