Usability is an important aspect of product development that deals with the quality of interaction between the user and the product. Capturing requirements is aimed at understanding what the users expect the system to do.
This report attempts to apply principles from both the Usability Engineering and the Requirements Engineering methodologies in the development of a subsystem for managing an e-commerce solution. The main focus is on the user interface design, which is developed by iterating the three phases of design, usability testing and evaluation, until the desired level of usability is achieved.
Prototyping was central to the rapid development, but the use of software prototyping tools instead of paper-mockups would reasonably have improved the usefulness of the evaluations. The desired usability level was set to reach a specified fix point, instead of attempting to achieve some absolute usability metrics as is typically practiced.
The former approach was apparently simpler to use without the broader experience otherwise needed to write reasonable requirements. The transition from the throw-away prototype to the implemented evolutionary prototype in ASP.NET posed some interesting problems that are further discussed.
Source: Linköping University
Author: Kvist, Markus