A concept of usability assessment for user-centered multimedia applications

User-centered activities related to multimedia include production and organization of multimedia content, filing, retrieval, sharing and multimedia communications. Today, there is a growing body of development teams and companies, that work to enable users to perform these activities in various technological ways. Integrating media functions into handheld devices, mobile phones, set-top boxes, and different “wearable” consumer electronics products, makes users affected in different ways. This paper emphasizes the effects of multimedia applications, which are always on users´ disposal, on users´ habits and their regular activities. We argue that application usability is inversely proportional to its usage interference with regular activities of people as users. We introduce novel metrics to capture the amount of this interference, and likewise introduce a measure for multimedia software usability, contributing to software usability assessment processes (SQA).