Proposing guidelines for usability inspection

Guidelines for designing interactive systems are largely available today in I ICI literature. They provide the designer with a basis for making good decisions, Applying guidelines is the starting point towards good design. However, it is generally acknowledged that the only way to actually determine the quality of the obtained interactive systems is to perform usability evaluation. Our research is aimed at developing effective evaluation methods, as solicited by the increasing demand of cost-effective usability evaluation tools, which especially comes from industry. In this paper we describe a novel inspection technique we have defined. It is based on the use of operational guidelines, called Abstract Tasks, that systematically drive the inspection activities, thus allowing even less experienced evaluators to come up with valuable results.