International Workshop on the Interplay between Usability Evaluation
and Software Development (I-USED 2008)
(Pisa, Italy, September 24th, 2008)
http://www.dsic.upv.es/workshops/i-used

In conjunction with the 2nd Conference on Human-Centred Software Engineering (HCSE 2008)
Pisa, Italy, September 25-26, 2008.



MOTIVATION

Software development is highly challenging. Despite many significant successes, several software development projects fail completely or produce software with serious limitations, including (1) lack of usefulness, i.e. the system does not adequately support the core tasks of the user, (2) unsuitable designs of user interactions and interfaces, (3) lack of productivity gains or even reduced productivity despite heavy investments in information.

Broadly speaking, two approaches have been taken to address these limitations. The first approach is to employ evaluation activities in a software development project in order to determine and improve the usability of the software, i.e. the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which users achieve their goals. To help software developers? work with usability within this approach, more than 20 years of research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has created and compared techniques for evaluating usability. The second approach is based on the significant advances in techniques and methodologies for user interface design that have been achieved in the last decades. In particular, researchers in user interface design have worked on improving the usefulness of information technology by focusing on a deeper understanding on how to extract and understand user needs. Their results today constitute the areas of participatory design and user-centered design.
In addition, the Software Engineering (SE) community has recognized that usability does not only affect the design of user interfaces but the software system development as a whole. In particular, efforts are focused on explaining the implications of usability for requirements gathering, software architecture design, and the selection of software components.

However, the interplay between these two fields, and between the activities they advocate to be undertaken in software development, have been limited. Integrating usability evaluation at relevant points in software development (and in particular to the user interface design) with successful and to-the-point results has proved difficult. In addition, research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Engineering (SE) has been done mainly independently of each other with no in substantial exchange of results and sparse efforts to combine the techniques of the two approaches. Larry Constantine, a prominent software development researcher, and his colleagues express it this way: ?Integrating usability into the software development process is not easy or obvious? (Juristo et al. 2001, p. 21).


THEME AND GOALS

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the HCI and SE fields to determine the state-of-the-art in the interplay between usability evaluation and software development and to generate ideas for new and improved relations between these activities. The aim is to base the determination of the current state on empirical studies. Presentations of new ideas on how to improve the interplay between HCI & SE to the design of usable software systems should also be based on empirical studies. Within this focus, topics of discussion include, but are not limited to:

- Which artifacts of software development are useful as the basis for usability evaluations?
- How do the specific artifacts obtained during software development influence the techniques that are relevant for the usability evaluation?
- In which forms are the results of usability evaluations supplied back into software development (including the UI design)?
- What are the characteristics of usability evaluation results that are needed in software development?
- Do existing usability evaluation methods deliver the results that are needed in user interface design?
- How can usability evaluation be integrated more directly in user interface design?
- How can usability evaluation methods be applied in emerging techniques for user interface design?
- How can usability evaluation methods be integrated to novel approaches for software development (e.g., model-driven development, web development, agile development).


PARTICIPANTS

Participants are accepted on the basis of their submitted papers. We aim at 15 with a maximum of 20 participants. The intended audience is primarily software engineering and human-computer interaction researchers who are working with the theme. The workshop should also be relevant for practitioners who have experiences with and ideas for improving the interplay between HCI and SE.


RELEVANCE TO THE FIELD

The main contribution is the determination of state-of-the-art and the identification of areas for improvement and further research. The HCI field includes a rich variety of techniques for either usability evaluation or user interface design. But there are very few methodological guidelines for the interplay between these key activities; and more important, there are few guidelines on how to properly integrate these two activities in a software development process.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Deadline: 20th July 2008
Acceptance Notification: 15th August 2008
Camera-ready Deadline: 1st September 2008
Workshop: 24th September 2008


SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Authors of papers must submit their papers by JULY 20. Papers should be submitted in PDF-format to the workshop reviewing system at (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iused2008). Participants will be notified before AUGUST 15 and subsequently the papers will be made available to the workshop participants. Papers must describe empirical studies of the interplay between usability evaluation and software development.

Two types of submissions are solicited: full papers with up to 6 pages describing substantial, completed work, and position papers with 2 pages describing either results that can be concisely reported or work in progress. Submissions must be clearly marked as one of these two types.

Both types of papers should be formatted according to the ACM template for proceedings available at (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). All papers will be peer reviewed by members of the program committee with regard to the relevance and originality of the work and their ability to generate discussions among the participants of the workshop.

The workshop proceedings will be published on-line as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series.


ACTIVITIED PLANNED AND OUTCOMES

Tentatively, the Workshop-programme (full day) is as follows:

- Introduction to workshop.
- A keynote speech by a recognized researcher in the field.
- Presentation of selected papers followed by limited discussion.
- The organization of the workshop participants around thematic groups.
- Reports from the groups and plenary discussion of main issues.
- Discussion of how to continue the work.

The outcome of the workshop is a collection of papers as well as a presentation and discussion of the validity and significance of these papers. We plan to contact key HCI/SE journals about their willingness to produce a special issue on the interplay between usability evaluation and software development based on the best papers from the workshop.


WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS

Silvia Abrahao, Universidad Polit?cnica de Valencia, Spain.
Jan Stage, Aalborg University, Denmark.
Kasper Hornb?k, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Natalia Juristo, Universidad Polit?cnica de Madrid, Spain.
Effie L-C Law, ETH Z?rich, Switzerland & University of Leicester, UK.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Scott Ambler, IBM Rational
Nigel Bevan, Professional Usability Services, UK
Cristina Cachero, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
Tiziana Catarci, Universit? degli Studi di Roma ?La Sapienza?, Italy
Xavier Ferre, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Maria Francesca Costabile, Universita' di Bari, Italy
Morten Hertzum, Roskilde University, Denmark
Emilio Insfran, Universidad Polit?cnica de Valencia, Spain
Nuno Jardim Nunes, University of Madeira, Portugal
Maristella Matera, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Emilia Mendes, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Philippe Palanque, IRIT, France
Fabio Patern?, ISTI-CNR, Italy
Isidro Ramos, Universidad Polit?cnica de Valencia, Spain
Ahmed Seffah, Universit? Concordia, Montreal, Canada
Jean Vanderdonckt, Universit? catolique de Louvain, Belgium

(list not complete yet)


SPONSORS

The workshop is mainly sponsored by the European COST Action n?294 MAUSE (Towards the Maturation of IT Usability Evaluation ? www.cost294.org). Several members of this COST action are members of the workshop Program Committee and guarantee a large geographical and topical coverage of the workshop.


CONTACT

The Workshop co-chairs can be contacted by email at the address i-used2008@dsic.upv.es