Yu-Hui Chen, Carol Anne Germain, Ababe Rorissa
Usability has had an ambiguous definition since its emergence in the 1980s. This research team gathered formal usability definitions by collecting articles in the fields of HCI, Usability Engineering, and Web Usability. They found 440 articles, and read these to find definitions of web usability. For articles that referred to another source, they added those sources. They came up with 63 formally published definitions having
502 concept terms among them. From this they identifed 11 attributes and then coded their frequency. Overall, the top five attributes were the same across Computer Science, LIS, and a category where the fields overlapped: Learnability, Effectiveness, User characteristics, Satisfaction, Efficiency – THE MOST important because the top five terms were in over 75% of definitions.
Takeaway: Next time I need a definition of usability, I will likely cite their presentation! Also, I learned a lot from the audience critique of their research methodology.
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