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How do users choose the software product? About 10 years ago developers struggled for programme efficiency and performance. Nowadays they try to develop a great variety of functions for software products. But users decide on these products depending on the level of software usability. How can we evaluate such a subjective characteristic as usability?

There is a large choice of various methods applied for usability assessment from expert evaluation (review) to usability testing. These methods differ in the degree of objectivity.

Usability testing is one of the most objective methods. It is held in a special laboratory equipped with several video cameras, webcams, microphones, an eye tracker and sometimes devices for pulse and ECG measurement.

Our team has recently conducted the usability testing of four the most popular development tools (IDEs). We designed the unified set of tasks which comprises the jobs carried out by developers on a daily basis.

Programmers performed the test tasks in the IDEs which supported their main programming language.

Based on the data received in the course of usability testing we compared the IDEs’ usability.

In the report it will be spoken about the methodology and the execution conditions of the present research.

Sofia Chebanova

Sofia Chebanova

Head of usability testing laboratory at Saint-Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (University ITMO).

One of the co-founders of the only fully equipped usability testing laboratory in the North-West of Russia. Sofia engages in the development and popularization of the User Experience among students, teaches HCI at University ITMO, conducts monthly workshops “Usability Talks” for beginners in the sphere of usability, was one of the initiators and programme committee chairman at ProfsoUX, the first conference on usability and user experience design in Saint-Petersburg.

Two higher education degrees at Saint-Petersburg State University in Information Technology and Mathematical Linguistics.

Aims to show every programmer the suffering of real people interacting with the poorly thought-out and inefficient interfaces every day.

Co-author: Alexander Markov

Alexander Markov

Usability Specialist, usability testing laboratory, Saint-Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (University ITMO).

BSc, postgraduate at the Faculty of Engineering Cybernetics of Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnical University (National Research University SPbSPU).

Speaker on “Usability Testing” at ProfsoUX, the first conference on usability and user experience design in Saint-Petersburg.

Inspired by Alan Cooper’s “About Face 3″ began working in the sphere of UX and HCI, learned the main stages of the UX process in practice. Designs, tests and improves interfaces. Interested in web technologies and web development tools, user experience design, prototyping, usability and interface optimization.

Professional goal – to be effective.