Usability and Development Environment for Software Applications: An Integrated Model

Abstract

Software quality is an important aspect for any successful software application and usability is the key issue for the perceived quality of a software system. There is basic need for systematic approaches to model the usability attributes for the development of usable software applications, but the efficient review of usability attributes for this purpose is still challenging. This paper describes usability attributes by reviewing various exist-ing standards and models, then attempts to their analytical comparison and proposes a new Environment Integrated Usability (EIU) model, which describes how various usability attributes can be integrated into single model and how it helps to define quality characteristics more clearly. In EIU model, there are twenty four attributes, which are categorized into three different environments. A key emphasis of this paper is the appropriateness of individual usability attribute and its impact on software system.

Keywords: usability, software, attribute, quality model, environment