Building a software product for a consumer market is a challenging task. Usability – a means to make product usage a smooth experience for the customer, and make customers stay with a product, is a challenge that is getting its due importance in a big way in software products of today. Many ideas and perceptions exist about how to build usability into a product. Some of these are taken care during the development of the product and some remain to be addressed, due to many reasons, in further cycles. The approach to providing a usable product to a customer has many ideas flowing into it. There is complexity added by varied approaches of different stakeholders during each stage of software development life cycle. The final result or complete, ready-to-ship product is an agglomeration of these ideas, all with the intent of making product usage as smooth as possible for the customer. The purpose of building any product is lost if the perspective of an end user is not taken into consideration. Usability is one of the success measures for a software product. It is fast becoming a competitive and distinguishing quality factor for many products. The customer experience, with a product, is what matters eventually, and sends out a clear message, to product companies that usability needs to be built in or engineered into products. Usability is now widely recognized as a key factor for software product organizations to gain customer loyalty. This paper discusses in brief, the challenges faced by system test engineers in evaluation of usability as a
quality factor for a software product. To set the context for intended readers and an audience, a brief introduction to the role of system testing as a critical function in a software product development organization is also provided. Additionally, this paper details the experiences during testing a product for usability and the eventual outcome of the exercise through some experiences of a system testing team, in their effort towards making a product more usable. This paper will highlight the following –
· Challenges faced during the testing of the product at system level from a usability perspective.
· Useful usability testing lessons from the past with hints and tips for the future.
· How system testing can contribute towards usability aspects of a product at different stages of
product development.
· How usability means going beyond just GUI.
The sharing of these experiences and lessons is intended to benefit any software product organization and give a testing perspective to building usability into the product. A product’s intent will be lost if the perspective of the end user is not taken in to consideration. The very intent of ensuring usability is to allow users to perform their desired tasks and accomplish their goals while using a product. Usability is becoming a competitive advantage for many products. Usage of a product is what most people experience while using the product, so it makes a lot of sense to build in usability.