Modeling usage. Techniques and tools

Software rarely runs without users. Sometimes the users are far away or only indirectly participating, but they're actually the major stakeholders of a given piece of software. However, most software is designed as if users don't matter. To focus on actual usage rather than fancy design and complex technologies, usability engineering is fast growing in all software domains. It's time that we look to usage modeling from a technical perspective. Authors Catharina Riedemann and Regine Freitag provide an overview of three major techniques and how to apply them for better usability.