The UPE/UNITRA Centre of Excellence (COE) recently launched South Africa`s first Usability Laboratory at a tertiary institution. The event was also marked by a seminar on Usability Engineering. The aim of the seminar was to give companies a better understanding of the key issues in software engineering, usability engineering and formal usability testing.
A major and often critical factor in the success of IT products and services is how easily people can learn and use computer software, systems and the Internet and how much they enjoy and benefit from this experience. A growing focus on usability has developed with the emergence of the World Wide Web as a focal point for business (e-commerce) and as an information resource. Usability in the development life cycle is included in an increasingly diverse range of technological products and mobile devices. Usability offers enormous benefits to organisations in terms of productivity, efficiency and quality of use, as well as increasing people`s feelings of satisfaction when using IT and Communications in their daily lives.
The UPE CoE was established in 1998 as part of the Telkom National CoE Programme in order to develop national expertise for the design, development and management of the national information infrastructure. The main focus of the UPE CoE is to conduct research into the use of technology to develop distributed multimedia applications. A new project was initiated this year, namely the SAMUEL (or SA Multimedia Usability Engineering Laboratory) project. SAMUEL is concerned with research into the methods and techniques used to design usable computer systems in South Africa. As part of this project, a state-of-the-art Usability Laboratory was installed at UPE in December 2000. This lab is the first of its kind at any tertiary institution in South Africa and will be used to formally evaluate the usability of a wide variety of interactive systems. It is envisaged that the results of this research will make a substantial contribution to the understanding of the process of developing interactive systems for South African users.
The UPE CoE is well equipped to support formal usability testing. Companies interested in learning about usability and how it can help them develop better software, can contact: Prof Janet Wesson (csajlw@upe.ac.za)
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