The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design
By Deborah J. Mayhew

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction
Background
This book is about achieving usability in product user interface design through a process called Usability Engineering. The user interface to an interactive product such as software can be defined as the languages through which the user and the product communicate with one another. In the case of software applications, this usually means the way displays and feedback are designed (the application-to-user language) and the way users indicate to the application what they want to do next through interactions with display elements via input devices such as a mouse or keyboard (the user-to-application language). As far as users are concerned, the user interface is the product. Just about their entire experience with the product is their experience with its user interface.
Usability is a measurable characteristic of a product user interface that is present to a greater or lesser degree. One broad dimension of usability is how easy to learn the user interface is for novice and casual users. Another is how easy to use (efficient, flexible, powerful) the user interface is for frequent and proficient users, after they have mastered the initial learning of the interface.
The user interface consists of the languages through which the user and product communicate
To achieve usability, the design of the user interface to any interactive product, including software, needs to take into account and be tailored around a number of factors, including:
? Cognitive, perceptual, and motor capabilities and constraints...
Copyright Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. 1999 under license agreement with Books24x7
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