Project Objectives

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Applications which deliver information through electronic media are the results of a lot of effort and investment capital. Those that provide the end users with added value and a positive cost/benefit succeed in today's extremely competitive market place.

How do you know if you are going to succeed? One of the issues a developer has to take account of is the degree to which their development process incorporates usability engineering and the degree to which their end product is validated against the expectations and experience of the kind of people who are going to be the end users.

The objective of BASELINE is to support the needs of Information Engineering projects in terms of planning and executing usability engineering and user validation activities.

Information Engineering projects will be provided with support for their user validation activities, including:

• up-to-date information about cost-benefit related aspects of suitable methods for user validation and usability engineering in the Information Engineering domain;
• an email help desk for questions concerning user validation and usability engineering in general;
• baseline usability data (synonymously used term is 'reference values') for electronic information applications;
• information about new approaches and methods relevant for usability engineering in the Information Engineering domain.

The project will collect:

• relevant information about the practicability and cost-benefit of currently applied usability engineering methods and procedures;
• validation results from Information Engineering projects.

The project will pool validation results from Information Engineering projects into reference values which can be used by Information Engineering projects and the wider Information Engineering audience either as baseline information for the design of new electronic information applications or to compare their own validation results with.

Finally, the project will disseminate the information collected in this support action in concertation meetings, annual BASELINE workshops, in quarterly electronic BASELINE newsletters, and on the World Wide Web.

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