ORIGINAL RESEARCH A systematic review of software usability studies Kalpna Sagar 1 • Anju Saha 1 Received: 15 March 2017 / Accepted: 11 October 2017 Ó Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Institute of Computer Applications and Management 2017 Abstract The aim of this review is to summarize, analyze various research studies and identify different research gaps regarding usability standards and models, usability evaluation methods, usability metric, usability at different phases of software development life cycle and application domains of usability. This systematic review of usability studies between 1990 and 2016 has been conducted and 150 studies are identified. We conclude that researchers have not reached at consensus w.r.t. software usability models. We identify that Efficiency, Effectiveness, Satis- faction, and Learnability are commonly addressed attri- butes in various existing software usability models and standards. Further, developers do not have sufficient knowledge to decide the appropriate usability evaluation method to use in given domain. On the contrary, Usability Testing, Heuristic Evaluation and Questionnaire are iden- tified frequently used methods for usability evaluation. Our findings investigate different metrics and measurement approaches used for usability estimation. But, current methods for usability measurement in practice do not include all ISO and ANSI defined aspects of usability into a single metric. Although, we identify studies concerning the integration of usability and software engineering into a single framework with generalizable results, their practical implementation is still missing and significantly needed. Conversely, this study highlights the fact that around 71% of studies address usability related issues during Design- Phase of software development life cycle. At present, usability issues have been identified in various domains but around 33.82% of studies identify that usability evaluation approach is widely used in Web-Domain. Keywords Software usability  Systematic literature review  Software development life cycle  Single usability metric  Object oriented metric  Master Usability Scaling 1 Introduction The concept of usability emerges from the term user- friendly. Software usability is defined as the ease of use of the software. IEEE Std.610.12 explains usability as ‘‘the ease with which a user can learn to operate, prepare inputs for, and interpret outputs of a system or component’’ [1]. Usability is a vital aspect of software quality. Software quality can be assessed by a number of internal and external criteria’s. A software quality model explains 6-broad categories of software quality: functionality, reli- ability, usability, efficiency, maintainability, and portabil- ity. In Fig. 1. these characteristics are further divided into sub-characteristics that have measurable attributes. In software engineering, usability is one of most important software quality attribute. ISO/IEC 9126 describes usability as ‘‘a set of attributes that bear on the effort needed for use, and on the individual assessment of such use, by a stated or implied the set of users’’ [2]. The ISO/IEC 9126 redefines usability–‘‘as the capability of the software to be understood, learned, used and liked by the user, when used under specified conditions’’. According to ISO/IEC 9126 software quality model [2], usability has 5 attributes: Understandability, Learnability, Operability, Attractiveness and Usability Compliance. The term & Kalpna Sagar sagarkalpna87@gmail.com Anju Saha Anju_kochhar@yahoo.com 1 University School of Information and Communication Technology GGSIPU, Sector 16-c, Delhi 110078, India 123 Int. j. inf. tecnol. DOI 10.1007/s41870-017-0048-1