Mix and match usability methods: picking the pieces for our project

Over the past two years the Usability Engineers at Attachmate Corporation have taken on new roles and responsibilities and have become involved earlier in the software development process. The opportunity to participate in the upfront design work, in addition to the more traditional usability evaluations, has been the driving force to mix and match pieces from existing usability methods. Many usability methods have been developed, and each method includes many techniques that can be used independent of the method. For this project, techniques were extracted from interview methods, task analysis methods, user-centered design methods, usability engineering methods, and usability testing methods. Usability was involved early enough in this software development project to impact the conceptual model for the product, the user interactions, and the user interface.