Abstract
The desire to improve usability in an ever-tightening market inspired several PC manufacturing companies to form a consortium, called the Ease of Use Roundtable, to pool resources and ideas. An initial problem addressed by the group was the lack of a conventional benchmark for ease of use, and therefore no accepted way to show improvement. The Ease of Use Roundtable members wanted a quick way to evaluate the usability of new PC designs, or to evaluate a number of similar systems, without recreating a huge usability testing effort each time. The group's objective was to create a checklist that an evaluator could use to measure PC usability, with some assurance that the outcome would be predictive of how end users would perform on that system in usability testing. This paper will describe the method we used to develop such a checklist and to show that it gave a reasonable prediction of usability test results. The paper will also discuss the limitations of the checklist, the problems we encountered in its development, and the opportunities for future work to expand on the method and the checklist itself.
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