User and Usability Modeling for HCI/HMI: A Research Design

A key reason for the presence of poor usability in products is the insufficient specification of usability perspectives effectively in product requirements specifications. The explicit expression of usability perspective in product requirements specifications is quite important in providing a clear visibility of usability aspects for both product developers and testers. Such specifications incorporating usability of human-interactive systems can be built for optimal usability and also evaluated effectively to uncover usability related issues. In this paper, we present a design science-oriented research design to test the proposition that incorporating user modeling and usability modeling in product requirements specifications improves design. We expect our proposal and the research design will make a contribution to knowledge by theory testing and to practice with effective techniques to specify usable human-interactive systems.