Summary: This paper presents the findings of our investigation into factors that affect the usability of software process descriptions from three sources of information: the literature on software process descriptions, data we collected from a survey of practitioners at the $5^{\text {th}}$ Australia SEPG conference, and an analysis of core elements of software process metamodels. To understand how the identified factors can be used to evaluate process descriptions, we used several factors as a set of criteria for a qualitative comparison of a number of process descriptions. As a result, we discovered some gaps between the sample process descriptions and those usability factors.