According to Brooke* "Usability does not exist in any absolute sense; it can only be defined with reference to particular contexts." That is, one cannot speak of usability without specifying what that particular usability is characterized by. Driven by the feedback of a reviewer at an international conference, I explore in which way one can precisely specify the kind of usability they are investigating in a given setting. Finally, I come up with a formalism that defines usability as a quintuple comprising the elements level of usability metrics, product, users, goals and context of use. Providing concrete values for these elements then constitutes the investigated type of usability. The use of this formalism is demonstrated in two case studies. * J. Brooke. SUS: A "quick and dirty" usability scale. In P. W. Jordan, B. Thomas, B. A. Weerdmeester, and A. L. McClelland, editors, Usability Evaluation in Industry. Taylor and Francis, 1996.

This Master's Thesis addresses the topic of usability testing of web-based systems. It reviews existing testing methodologies and recommends a collection of test tools and approaches suitable for usability testing. This thesis introduces a new methodology called Tabie for scoring web system under test. The methodology combines both the ease of use of the user interface (syntactic testing) as as well as its content (semantical testing). This approach is well suited for workflows in marketing agencies where content tweaks and its evaluation is done on an ongoing basis in order to attract more viewers and potential customers. The Tabie methodology provides a quantitative and repeatable process, automating the tweak-evaluate iteration.

In the last few years there has been a great development of e-shops and their usage. More and more customers are searching for the opportunity to buy products and services through the internet shops. This is related to the fact that more and more emphasis is placed on their applicability. This thesis deals with the quality of the site and the needs of the application and descibes the use of interactive elements. All the mentioned options are applied in this thesis and compared to the specific e-shop. As a part of the user usability testing there is also a suggestion for corrective actions of discovered deficiencies.

Working together at distance is no easy thing and the usability of the digital workspaces used is of utmost importance. Companies providing these digital workspaces constantly needs to evaluate the usability to find problems and improve their product with design principles for designing interactive systems. The purpose of this study is to contribute with knowledge of the usability of the digital workspace MS Teams. There are several methods for usability evaluation but the most fundamental is to test with real users, a usability test. The method used to evaluate the usability of Microsoft Teams is a usability tests with participants as close to the intended end-users as possible and with post-test interviews after each test. During the usability test the participants were observed whilst using the product and thinking aloud. Thinking aloud is the participant, while using the product, continuously think out loud which gives the researcher an opportunity to understand how the participants view the product and to identify any misconceptions they might have. The main results show that there are several usability problems with Microsoft Teams especially during the log on process and with changing output source. At the same time the results show that sharing files and calling are some of Microsoft Teams strengths in regard to usability and that the perceived usability of Microsoft Teams is high.

The purpose of the study is to investigate college and university students' experience of theusability of Zoom as support for distance education based on usability goals from theory byPreece, Roger and Sharp (2016). To investigate students' experience of the usefulness ofZoom for distance education, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten studentsfrom different universities and colleges with different educations. The results of theinterviews showed that students' experience of usability at Zoom was good and providedgood support for distance learning based on Preece, Roger and Sharp usability goals (2016).

The video game industry can be ruthless. As a developer, you usually find yourself working in the popular third-party development tools of the time. These tools however might not provide the best usability and quality of life one desires. This can lead to a lot of frustration for the developer, especially when the development enters a crunch period of long and hard work. We believe some of the frustration can be avoided, and we believe this can be done by creating effective, functional and user-friendly integrated development tools specialized for the development environment. In this master's thesis we investigated just that, how integrated game development tools can be designed to be usable in terms of effectiveness and learnability. The investigation was performed by designing and implementing an integrated game development tool. The development of the tool was performed iteratively with user testing between every iteration to find usability defects, allowing the tool to be refined and improved throughout the development process. To finish off the development process, there was a final user test where professional video game developers tried out the tool and then answered a System Usability Scale questionnaire. The System Usability Scale score and task completion rate showed that the final state of the tool can be considered highly usable in terms of effectiveness and averagely usable in terms of learnability. This suggests that involving user testing in the development process is vital for ensuring good usability in the end product.

The digitization in public transport is aimed at all citizens, which means that everyone should be able to use IT-based services in a simple way and obtain available information. The purpose of this study is to identify the usability issues that can occur on “My pages” of county-wide bus service. The purpose is to find out the improvements that can be made to the efficiency and user experience on My pages based on the comments of the test participants.  The research questions in this study are: What usability problems can be identified on My pages? What efficiency improvements can be made on My pages based on test participant feedback and how is the user experience perceived by test participants? The methods used during this study are usability testing using eye-tracking equipment, observation, thinking aloud, and structured interview that includes background questions about the participants.  The results are based on the data collection through the test participants. Eight usability issues were identified, and eight improvement points were revealed. Eye-tracking equipment combined with gaze-plots and observation can be used to see how a usability problem arises. Test participants comments when thinking aloud and interviewing give a better understanding of testing behavior.

With the increased use of online recruitment websites, many organizations have started building up these services to serve various kinds of users. There are some forms of usability evaluations that measure web applications. The inspection method is the most widely used, especially the heuristics evaluation. However, when facing substantial market demands, there is no set of heuristics to guide web designers on how to offer users a good user experience.  Therefore, developing usability heuristics for online recruiting websites is very necessary. According to existing research, Nielsen ten heuristics are the most widely used and well known. However, with the continual emergence of new technologies, these ten heuristics cannot continue to satisfy designers who are looking for more focused heuristics that apply to a specific domain. There exists no working strategy for developing specialized guidelines to ensure specialized heuristics actually work better than using general heuristics.  This thesis aims to develop usability heuristics for online recruitment website domains. Even though there are no appropriate theories or models for developing heuristics in a specific domain, we established a proposal of 21 usability heuristics for online recruitment based on the existing heuristics and methodologies to develop new specialized heuristics. These new heuristics offer evaluators smoother operations with higher efficiency (problems/time spent) in heuristics evaluation.

As the digitisation of healthcare progresses, there are still problems in terms of usability. With the goal of exploring solutions to these, an email inspired design for an electronic health record system was implemented using modern web technologies. The implementation was then evaluated in a series of usability tests conducted with five orthopaedic surgeons. Participants were asked to perform small tasks on a mocked data set, and the sessions were concluded with debriefing interviews. The focus was on the areas that are new in this design. The results suggest that the general design works, and no critical flaws were identified at this stage. Most of the issues that were found are likely to be solved with more training and experience, but there is still room for improvement. Participants had positive reactions overall, and plenty of feedback was collected regarding areas of improvement and feature suggestions. Due to the limitations of the test, the findings mostly relate to the intuitiveness of the design. To draw stronger conclusions regarding the viability of the design in a real environment, further testing with more data, realistic test tasks and more prerequisite training is necessary. / Digitiseringen inom sjukvården ökar, men det finns fortfarande problem när det kommer till användbarheten av de digitala system som finns på marknaden. Med målet att utforska lösningar på dessa problem implementerades i detta arbete en e-post-inspirerad gränssnittsdesign för ett digitalt journalsystem med hjälp av moderna webb-teknologier. Implementationen utvärderades genom användartester där fem ortopediska kirurger deltog. Deltagarna ombads använda gränssnittet för att utföra små testuppgifter med påhittad patientdata, och sessionerna avslutades med intervjufrågor. Fokuset var på de delar som är nya i den här designen jämfört med redan existerande system. Resultatet visar att det generella upplägget fungerar, och inga kritiska brister upptäcktes i detta stadie. De flesta av problemen som uppdagades kan troligen lösas genom att användarna ges möjlighet till mer träning och får mer erfarenhet, men det finns fortfarande förbättringutrymme. Deltagarna hade positiva reaktioner i allmänhet, och många förslag kring förbättringsområden och önskemål kring utökad funktionalitet samlades upp. På grund av användartestets begränsningar belyser resultaten i detta test mest vilka delar av gränssnittet som är intuitiva eller ej, medan det som är mer intressant för den här typen av dagligen använda system egentligen är huruvida de är effektiva att använda i det dagliga arbetet. För att kunna dra säkrare slutsatser kring om den här designen skulle fungera i riktiga arbetssituationer behövs mer testning med större mängder patientdata, mer realistiska testuppgifter och mer tid för deltagarna att lära sig systemet i förväg.

This thesis aimed to investigate how moderated remote usability testing (RUT) tools can support the moderator's role and skills to create design principles for RUT tools. The study gathered knowledge of how to perform a RUT and the skills of a good moderator. This study resulted in a contextual inquiry with findings of what could support or obstruct the moderator according to the moderator's role and skills, opportunities and difficulties with RUT tools. The findings led to design principles of designing RUT tools to support the moderator's role and skills. The study resulted in usability, user and functional requirements with a prototype of a RUT tool to visualize how to use the design principles. / Denna studie syftade till att undersöka hur verktyg för modererade användbarhetstests på distans kan designas för att stödja moderatorns roll och färdigheter. Studien innefattar kunskap om hur man utför ett modererat användbarhetstest på distans och vilka färdigheter som krävs för att vara en bra moderator i sådana test. Studien innefattade en fältstudie som resulterade i funktioner i ett verktyg för användbarhetstester på distans som kan stödja eller hindra en moderators utförande med avseende på dess roll och färdigheter samt möjligheter och svårigheter i sådana verktyg. Designprinciper skapades i syfte att vägleda designen av verktyg för användbarhetstest på distans som stödjer moderatorns roll och färdigheter. Studien resulterade i användbarhets, användar- och funktionskrav som med designprinciperna visualiserades i en prototyp av ett verktyg för modererad användbarhetstest på distans.