A human reliability based usability evaluation method for safety-critical software

Conference · Sat Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2006

OSTI ID:22029996

Boring, R L; Tran, T Q; Gertman, D I ^[1]; Ragsdale, A ^[2]

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1. Human Factors, Instrumentation and Control Systems, Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, ID 83415 (United States)
2. Dept. of Psychology, Brigham Young, Univ.-Idaho, Rexburg, ID 83460 (United States)

Boring and Gertman (2005) introduced a novel method that augments heuristic usability evaluation methods with that of the human reliability analysis method of SPAR-H. By assigning probabilistic modifiers to individual heuristics, it is possible to arrive at the usability error probability (UEP). Although this UEP is not a literal probability of error, it nonetheless provides a quantitative basis to heuristic evaluation. This method allows one to seamlessly prioritize and identify usability issues (i.e., a higher UEP requires more immediate fixes). However, the original version of this method required the usability evaluator to assign priority weights to the final UEP, thus allowing the priority of a usability issue to differ among usability evaluators. The purpose of this paper is to explore an alternative approach to standardize the priority weighting of the UEP in an effort to improve the method's reliability. (authors)

• Research Organization: American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
• OSTI ID: 22029996
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
COMPUTER CODES
EVALUATION
HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEERING
PROBABILISTIC ESTIMATION
PROBABILITY
REACTOR SAFETY
RELIABILITY