Originally posted on 2008.
Earlier this year, I submitted a research paper about a concept called usability-based split testing to a web engineering conference (Speicher et al., 2014). My evaluation involved a questionnaire that asked for ratings of different usability aspects—such as informativeness, readability etc.—of web interfaces. So obviously, I use the word “usability” in that paper a lot; however, without having thought of its exact connotation in the context of my research before. Of course I was aware of the differences compared to User eXperience, but just assumed that the used questionnaire and description of my analyses would make clear what my paper understands as usability.
Then came the reviews and one reviewer noted:
“There is a weak characterization of what Usability is in the context of Web Interface Quality, quality models and views. Usability in this paper is a key word. However, it is weakly defined and modeled w.r.t. quality.”
This confused me at first since I thought it was pretty clear what usability is and that my paper was pretty well understandable in this respect. In particular, I thought Usability has already been defined and characterized before, so why does this reviewer demand me to characterize it again? Figuratively, they asked me: “When you talk about usability, what is that ›usability‹?”
