Introduction to special issue on usability engineering

This Special Issue on Usability Engineering is meant to build a bridge between the software engineering (SE) and the human-computer interaction (HCI) research communities. Usability engineering is emerging as the commercial and practical discipline that incorporates participatory design, rapid prototyping, and iterative evaluation. User-centered design and usability evaluations have become common practices in many organizations, but in the majority of software development shops they are still novel and not routinely practiced. Typical software engineering development cycles do not accommodate these practices. The Software Engineering Institute which influences government and commercial practice and education rarely mentions usability or user interface design methods. So the question remains: How can usability engineering practices become part of the mainstream of software engineering? We believe that widespread inclusion of usability engineering practices in development will be fostered by empirical studies validating these practices.