Användbarhetskunskapens hinder : En studie om utmaningar med att sprida användbarhetskunskap bland mjukvaruutvecklare inom organisationer

Sammanfattning: Usability is a concept that describes the extent to which users can achieve specific goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specific context. Despite that many studies have been written about usability and usability tests, surprisingly few have explored how organizations work with usability knowledge. Since previous studies have indicated that usability issues are commonly encountered the purpose of this study is to increase usability knowledge among software developers within organizations by analyzing which obstacles are in the way of spreading usability knowledge and how it is possible to counteract these. Six software developers in organizations have been interviewed about their experience with usability knowledge for this study. The result of the study shows that the respondents’ organizations prioritized usability knowledge lower than technical knowledge for dissemination of knowledge, which meant that software developers had to take almost all initiatives to learn about usability themselves. When opportunities did present themselves for dissemination of usability knowledge the respondents were not made aware of it by their superiors or upper management. Usability knowledge also becomes outdated quickly which leads to failures in many attempts to create common knowledge databases within this area of expertise. The software developers interviewed indicated that some of the most informative moments for usability knowledge were direct observation of end users. Despite this they were very rarely given the opportunity to personally participate in these activities because of how difficult it is to convince both supervisors and end users that it is a rewarding activity for all involved parties. The obstacles to spreading usability knowledge that were identified were categorized in accordance with the SECI-model, namely Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization. The study contributes with knowledge that the SECI-model can successfully be utilized to identify deficiencies and lost potential among knowledge creating moments for usability. The study also presents an explanation to that dissemination of usability knowledge is prioritized lower than technical knowledge in the form of selective functional stupidity, an  unwillingness to critically reflect about difficult questions in order to maintain productivity and suppress insecurity within a specific area. Furthermore the study presents explanations to why usability knowledge is difficult to teach based on the theory of tacit and explicit knowledge. Since usability knowledge is contextually dependent as well as hard to formulate and generalize it is difficult to translate it from tacit to explicit, which makes many knowledge creating moments within the subject fail. Finally a number of recommendations are presented for counteracting the identified obstacles to spreading usability knowledge and thereby achieve the purpose of increasing usability knowledge among software developers within organizations.