Abstract
With the development of information technology,personalcomputers are becoming increasingly powerful and are using inour daily life.It should be pointed out that the advancedhardware cannot work alone,it needs helps of usable advancedsoftware to manifest its intended features. In recent years,integrated software appears to be a popular trend in softwareindustry.The main advantage of integrated software is thatvarious conventional single purposed software,i.e.,wordprocessor,spreadsheet,graphic tools,etc.,can be linked to alowsharing information among each other such that users may savelearning time and operation time,be more convenient,and improveoverall performance.However,since it becomes more complex foran integrated software,the human-computer interaction must besimplified otherwise users may have a hard time in learning andusing the software. The purpose of this research is to developa Self Usability Evaluation tool(SUE) that can be used byintegrated software designers in earlier development stages toevaluate how easy the developing software can be learned andused.It is expected that by using SUE the integrated softwaredeveloped will have high usability and benefit users. Existingsoftware usability evaluation techniques and Microsoft Office,an integrated software package for IBM and compatible PC,werereviewed and a SUE tool was developed.The MS-Office wasselected as a vehicle for usability evaluation and testing.Before formal experiment,a pre-study was conducted toinvestigate users' behaviors and the functions and commandsthey frequently used.Based on the results,a hypermediasimulation of two versions of software interface were developed.Subjects were asked to work through the simulation andsubjective as well as objective data were collected.The resultshows that SUE can achieve the goal of software usabilityevaluation.More subjective and objective data are worth to becollected for further modification of this software usability