I-UsE: Integrated Usability Evaluation Environment

Abstract

Software usability evaluation (UE) is a typically neglected phase by software developers. Due to the high costs of properly done formal usability studies, companies easily cut investment, contributing deliberately to the development of biased software with usability problems. Given this panorama, the development of UE tools is becoming increasingly important in order to tackle both the costs associated with the collection of data and the analysis of usability experiments. This paper presents a practical software tool to support formal studies of UE by combining video recording, live screen capture and analysis features together. This open tool is being developed using standart hardware and free software components, making it a cost effective solution for UE.