TRAINING SOFTWARE ENGINEERS IN A NOVEL USABILITY EVALUATION TECHNIQUE

Novel approaches to designing or analysing systems only become useful when they are usable by practitioners in the field, and not just by th eir originators. Design techniques often fail to make the transition f rom research to practice because insufficient attention is paid to und erstanding and communicating the skills required to use them. This pap er reports on work to train software engineering students to use a use r-centred language for describing and analysing interface designs call ed the ''Programmable User Model Instruction Language'', or IL. Variou s types of data, including video, students' IL descriptions and brief usability reports were collected during training, and subsequently ana lysed. These show that after 6 h of training, students have a good gra sp of the syntax of the notation, and start using notational affordanc es to support their reasoning, but that their reasoning is still limit ed by a poor grasp of the underlying cognitive theory. A comparison of the analyses of trainees with those of experts provides a means of de veloping a better understanding of the nature of expertise in this are a-as comprising an understanding of the syntax and the surface semanti cs of the notation, the underlying ognitive theory, the method of cond ucting an analysis and the implications of the analysis for design. (C ) 1998 Academic Press.