Context of Use within usability activities

By Martin C. Maguire. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud., 2001

321 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Designing for usability involves establishing user requirements for a new system or product, developing design solutions, prototyping the system and the user interface, and testing it with representative users. However, before any usability design or evaluation activity can begin, it is necessary to understand the Context of Use for the product, i.e. the goals of the user community, and the main user, task and environmental characteristics of the situation in which it will be operated. This paper describes the background to, and importance of, understanding Context of Use, and presents a process for performing a context analysis. The method described is particularly aimed at non-experts in the area of user-centred design and evaluation.

Subfields: Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0a0b942a61f6e2e69dd5e40ea382c9e501563cd

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In Human-Computer Interaction

1. Rachel Harrison
2. Derek Flood
3. David A. Duce

Citations in the corpus

• Usability of mobile applications: literature review and rationale for a new usability model (2013, background): “Context of use can vary enormously and so should be considered an important factor of usability [5,33].”
• Methods to support human-centred design (2001, background): “See also the paper on context-of-use analysis in this journal issue (Maguire, 2001a).”