Usability Engineering for Complex Interactive Systems Development

Abstract

Usability engineering is a cost-effective, usercentered process that ensures a high level of effectiveness, efficiency, and safety in complex interactive systems. This paper presents a brief description of usability engineering activities, and discusses our experiences with leading usability engineering activities for three very different types of interactive applications: a responsive workbench-based command and control application called Dragon, a wearable augmented reality application for urban warfare called Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS), and a head-mounted hardware device, called Nomad, for dismounted soldiers. For each application, we present our approach to usability engineering, how we tailored the usability engineering process and methods to address application-specific needs, and give results.