Mission

The ultimate goal of MAUSE is to bring more science to bear on Usability Evaluation Methods (UEM) development, evaluation, and comparison, aiming for results that can be transferred to industry and educators, thus leading to increased competitiveness of European industry and benefit to the public.

Objectives

The main objective of the COST 294 is threefold:

• to deepen the understanding about the inherent strengths and weaknesses of individual Usability Evaluation Methods (UEMs);
• to identify reliable and valid methods to compare different UEMs in terms of their effectiveness, efficiency as well as scope of applicability;
• to develop efficacious strategies for extracting useful information from the results of UEMs to improve the system tested.

Results

In 2005, we established a digital library, where we collect, describe and compare different methods and techniques for evaluating usability. In the frame of the International Conference INTERACT 2005, we organized a workshop called COST 294 International Workshop on User Interface Quality Models and at the end of the year we started preparing a book entitled “Maturing Usability: Quality and Software, Interaction and Value, which appeared in 2006, published by Springer.

Partners

Partners in the project MAUSE are:

• Aristotle University
• Augsburg University of Applied Sciences
• Babes-Bolyai University
• Catholic University of Louvain
• ETH Zurich
• Gdansk University of Technology
• ICI Bucuresti
• ICT&S Center, Universität Salzburg
• INRIA-Rocquencourt
• Institut ’Jozef Stefan’
• ISTI-CNR
• Johannes Kepler Universitaet Linz
• LIIHS-IRIT
• Lulea University of Technology
• Middlesex University
• SINTEF
• Technical Research Centre of Finland
• Technical University of Valencia
• University College of London
• University of Copenhagen
• University of Cyprus
• University of Iceland
• University of Konstanz
• University of Linz
• University of Novi Sad
• University of Oulu
• University of Piraeus
• University of Sunderland
• Uppsala University