At the International Human-Computer Interface Conference (CHI 2000) in The Hague,

The Netherlands, April 1-6, 2000, ITL's Jean Scholtz conducted a Special Interest Group (SIG) entitled "Common Industry Format for Usability Test Reports." The session was based on the Industry USability Reporting (IUSR) Project, which is led by NIST and includes members from industry such as Boeing, Microsoft, Kodak, State Farm Insurance, and Oracle. The primary goal of the project is to raise the visibility of usability as a factor when buying software. The key idea is that software purchases are costly, but the more usable that a piece of software is, the lower the post-purchase maintenance costs will be. More information about the IUSR project can be found at: http://www.nist.gov/iusr.

CONTACT: Sharon Laskowski, ext. 4535