Measuring Usability

To be able to argue for a decision pro or contra a usability property one must be able to support the argument by appropriate measurements. A good comprehensive overview about HMI testting can be found in Dumas and Fox 2008 [38]. Dumas and Fox stress the importance to view usability testing as part of the overall design and engineering process. In that respect it differs from the traditional testing paradigm of psychology in general as well as from the more specialized paradigm of cognitive psychology (cf. figure 4.1). They enhance furthermore the scope of usability testing which usually is looking for functionality and usability by adding the growing segment of gaming by introducing the the dimension of pleasure [38]:1145.

Figure 4.1: Psychological and Usability Tests; Differences
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The main difference between the usual psychological experimental set up and a HMI setup can be characterized as follows:



Subsections
Gerd Doeben-Henisch 2012-12-14