The authors propose two metrics to demonstrate the impact integrating human-computer interaction (HCI) activities in software engineering (SE) processes. User experience metric (UXM) is a product metric that measures the subjective and ephemeral notion of the user’s experience with a product. Index of integration (IoI) is a process metric that measures how integrated the HCI activities were with the SE process.

Both metrics have an organizational perspective and can be applied to a wide range of products and projects. Attempt was made to keep the metrics light-weight. While the main motivation behind proposing the two metrics was to establish a correlation between them and thereby demonstrate the effectiveness of the process, several other applications are emerging.

The two metrics were evaluated with three industry projects and reviewed by four faculty members from a university and modified based on the feedback.

User Experience Metric and Index of Integration: Measuring Impact of HCI Activities on User Experience (PDF, 163 kb)