260
■
Handbook on Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing: Status and Perspective
The test also requires more resources than other methods. Moreover, it is not convenient and
may be expensive to get subjects to come to the testing laboratory especially if the subject is at a
remote location.
With its evident pros and cons, nevertheless, usability is still playing a steadily more important
role in software development. This can be proved by the growing budgets for usability engineering.
According to Nielsen [23], in 1971 it was estimated that a reasonable share for usability budgets
for nonmilitary systems was only about 3%. However, in 1993, Nielsen surveyed 31 development
projects and found that the median share of their budgets allocated to usability engineering ...