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Making a difference: a survey of the usability profession in Sweden

Published: 23 October 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Poor usability in interactive systems/products is still a major problem for users and buyers, despite efforts made by an increasing number of usability professionals. How come this is so and what are the main obstacles to usability work?
In this paper we report the results of a survey of usability professionals in Sweden, conducted in 2003. The survey identified, e.g. their background and experiences, the type of employment, organization, and products/systems, the software development process being used and some key success factors for usability work. The results indicate, among other things, that management support and project management support are essential for the usability worker. Moreover, they face problems such as, usability and user involvement having low priority in the projects.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
NordiCHI '04: Proceedings of the third Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction
October 2004
472 pages
ISBN:1581138571
DOI:10.1145/1028014
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 October 2004

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Author Tags

  1. UCD methods
  2. development processes
  3. software development
  4. usability
  5. usability professionals

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NordiCHI04
NordiCHI04: NordiCHI 2004
October 23 - 27, 2004
Tampere, Finland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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