Software development is highly challenging. Despite many significant successes, several software development projects fail completely or produce software with serious limitations, including (1) lack of usefulness, i.e. the system does not adequately support the core tasks of the user, (2) unsuitable designs of user interactions and interfaces, (3) lack of productivity gains or even reduced productivity despite heavy investments in information technology (Gould & Lewis 1985, Strassman 1985, Brooks 1987, Matthiasen & Stage 1992, Nielsen 1993, Attewell 1994, Landauer 1995).

  Broadly speaking, two approaches have been taken to address these limitations. The first approach is to employ evaluation activities in a software development project in order to determine and improve the usability of the software, i.e. the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which users achieve their goals (ISO 1998, Frøkjær et al. 2000). To help software developers’ work with usability within this approach, more than 20 years of research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has created and compared techniques for evaluating usability (Lewis 1982; Nielsen & Mack 1994).

  The second approach is based on the significant advances in techniques and methodologies for user interface design that have been achieved in the last decades. In particular, researchers in user interface design have worked on improving the usefulness of information technology by focusing on a deeper understanding on how to extract and understand user needs. Their results today constitute the areas of participatory design and user-centered design (e.g. Greenbaum & Kyng 1991, Beyer & Holtzblatt 1998, Bødker, Kensing & Simonsen 2004).

  In addition, the Software Engineering (SE) community has recognized that usability does not only affect the design of user interfaces but the software system development as a whole. In particular, efforts are focused on explaining the implications of usability for requirements gathering (Juristo et al., 2007), software architecture design (Bass, John & Kates 2001; Bass & John 2003), and the selection of software components (Perry & Wolf 1992).

  However, the interplay between these two fields, and between the activities they advocate to be undertaken in software development, have been limited. Integrating usability evaluation at relevant points in software development (and in particular to the user interface design) with successful and to-the-point results has proved difficult. In addition, research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Engineering (SE) has been done mainly independently of each other with no in substantial exchange of results and sparse efforts to combine the techniques of the two approaches. Larry Constantine, a prominent software development researcher, and his colleagues express it this way: “Integrating usability into the software development process is not easy or obvious” (Juristo et al. 2001, p. 21).