It is widely known that usability is a critical quality attribute of IT-based systems. Manystudies have developed various methods for finding out usability problems and metrics for meas-uring several dimensions underlying usability concept. Usability professionals have emphasizedthat usability should be integrated into the development life cycle in order to maximize the usabil-ity of systems with minimal cost. To achieve this, it is essential to classify usability problems sys-tematically and connect the usability problems into the activities of designing user interfaces andtasks. However, there is a lack of framework or method for these two things and thus remains achallengeable research issue. As a beginning study, this paper proposes a conceptual frameworkfor addressing the two issues. We firstly summarize usability-related studies so far, including us-ability factors and evaluation methods. Secondly, we review seven approaches to identifying andclassifying usability problems. Based on this review and opinions of usability engineers in real in-dustry, this paper proposes a framework comprising of three viewpoints, which can help usabilityengineers characterize and categorize usability problems.
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