Avi Parush

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Usability Studies. This journal was born in response to a growing need in the community of usability practitioners and researchers. Have you ever you looked for the most recent findings of usability studies that you can learn from or wondered where to publish interesting results from […] [Read More]

Jakob Nielsen

The biggest problem facing the usability field is how to scale up massively so that we can impact all the user interface designs in the world. How big is this challenge? As of November 2005, there are about 75 million websites on the Internet. There are also about 30 million intranets inside corporate firewalls. Thus, […] [Read More]

Aki Kekäläinen, Anne Kaikkonen, Anu Kankainen, Mihael Cankar, Titti Kallio

Abstract Usability testing a mobile application in the laboratory seems to be sufficient when studying user interface and navigation issues. The usability of a consumer application was tested in two environments: in a laboratory and in a field with a total of 40 test users. The same problems were found in both environments, differences occurred […] [Read More]

Alex Genov

Abstract This paper argues that in the field of usability, debates about number of users, the use of statistics, etc. in the abstract are pointless and even counter-productive. We propose that the answers depend on the research questions and business objectives of each project and thus cannot be discussed in absolute terms. Sometimes usability testing […] [Read More]

Mary Theofanos, Whitney Quesenbery

Abstract Many usability practitioners conduct most of their usability evaluations to improve a product during its design and development. We call these “formative” evaluations to distinguish them from “summative” (validation) usability tests at the end of development. A standard for reporting summative usability test results has been adopted by international standards organizations. But that standard […] [Read More]

Deborah S. Carstens, Pauline Patterson

Abstract A usability study was conducted to identify usability problems as well as recommendations for improvement for three travel sales websites. The study performed testing on twenty participants, between the ages of 19 and 65, recruited from the university campus consisting of students, faculty, and staff. The three websites tested were Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, and Travelocity.com. […] [Read More]