Software Design Guidelines for Usability

For years, the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community has crafted usability guidelines that clearly define what
characteristics a software system should have in order to be easy to use. However, in the Software Engineering (SE)
community keep falling short of successfully incorporating these recommendations into software projects. From a SE
perspective, the process of incorporating usability features into software is not always straightforward, as a large number
of these features have heavy implications in the underlying software architecture. For example, successfully including an
“undo” feature in an application requires the design and implementation of many complex interrelated data structures and
functionalities. Our work is focused upon providing developers with a set of software design patterns to assist them in the
process of designing more usable software. This would contribute to the proper inclusion of specific usability features
with high impact on the software design. Preliminary validation data show that usage of the guidelines also has positive
effects on development time and overall software design quality

The Cognitive Atlas: Employing Interaction Design Processes to Facilitate Collaborative Ontology Creation

The Cognitive Atlas is a collaborative knowledge-building project that aims to develop an ontology that characterizes the current conceptual framework among researchers in cognitive science and neuroscience. The project objectives from the beginning focused on usability, simplicity, and utility for end users. Support for Semantic Web technologies was also a priority in order to support interoperability with other neuroscience projects and knowledge bases. Current off-the-shelf semantic web or semantic wiki technologies, however, do not often lend themselves to simple user interaction designs for non-technical researchers and practitioners; the abstract nature and complexity of these systems acts as point of friction for user interaction, inhibiting usability and utility. Instead, we take an alternate interaction design approach driven by user centered design processes rather than a base set of semantic technologies. This paper reviews the initial two rounds of design and development of the Cognitive Atlas system, including interactive design decisions and their implementation as guided by current industry practices for the development of complex interactive systems

Adaptive development and maintenance of user-centric software systems

A software system cannot be developed without considering the various facets of its environment. Stakeholders – including the users that play a central role – have their needs, expectations, and perceptions of a system. Organisational and technical aspects of the environment are constantly changing. The ability to adapt a software system and its requirements to its environment throughout its full lifecycle is of paramount importance in a constantly changing environment. The continuous involvement of users is as important as the constant evaluation of the system and the observation of evolving environments. We present a methodology for adaptive software systems development and maintenance. We draw upon a diverse range of accepted methods including participatory design, software architecture, and evolutionary design. Our focus is on user-centred software systems

A requirements framework for novice web developers

This paper introduces a requirements framework intended to guide novice web developers. The work is based on two earlier studies which found that the requirements phase is not well served in web development methods and that there is no agreed set of requirements from practitioners as to what they would like to see in a web development method. The requirements framework outlined here is developed by novice practitioners and later evaluated by them as flexible, simple and easy to use

Agile Requirements Engineering: A systematic literature review

Nowadays, Agile Software Development (ASD) is used to cope with increasing complexity in system development. Hybrid development models, with the integration of User-Centered Design (UCD), are applied with the aim to deliver competitive products with a suitable User Experience (UX). Therefore, stakeholder and user involvement during Requirements Engineering (RE) are essential in order to establish a collaborative environment with constant feedback loops. The aim of this study is to capture the current state of the art of the literature related to Agile RE with focus on stakeholder and user involvement. In particular, we investigate what approaches exist to involve stakeholder in the process, which methodologies are commonly used to present the user perspective and how requirements management is been carried out. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with an extensive quality assessment of the included studies. We identified 27 relevant papers. After analyzing them in detail, we derive deep insights to the following aspects of Agile RE: stakeholder and user involvement, data gathering, user perspective, integrated methodologies, shared understanding, artifacts, documentation and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). Agile RE is a complex research field with cross-functional influences. This study will contribute to the software development body of knowledge by assessing the involvement of stakeholder and user in Agile RE, providing methodologies that make ASD more human-centric and giving an overview of requirements management in ASD.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Learner-Centred Design and Evaluation of Web-Based E-Learning Environments

Designing E-learning is a combination of pedagogical design, usability and information architecture. E-learning environments should have intuitive interfaces and clear information design, allowing learners to focus on learning. However, there is often a mismatch between what an on-line educator thinks the learner would learn, and what a learner thinks he will, and then has learned from the course. In addition, there is sometimes a mismatch between how an educator wants to teach and what is represented on the interface by the instructional designers. Such mismatches affect the learner's experience and his motivation for E-learning. In this paper, we will first discuss the source and nature of these mismatches. Next, we will discuss whether usability techniques in the HCI literature are appropriate for evaluating E-learning environments for the learner experience. We will then propose a combination of requirements elicitation and usability techniques for learner-centred design and evaluation of Web-based E-learning environments. The proposed methodology is based on our experience of conducting empirical studies for evaluating user-system interactions in E-Commerce contexts

How do software architects consider non-functional requirements: an exploratory study

© 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Dealing with non-functional requirements (NFRs) has posed a challenge onto software engineers for many years. Over the years, many methods and techniques have been proposed to improve their elicitation, documentation, and validation. Knowing more about the state of the practice on these topics may benefit both practitioners' and researchers' daily work. A few empirical studies have been conducted in the past, but none under the perspective of software architects, in spite of the great influence that NFRs have on daily architects' practices. This paper presents some of the findings of an empirical study based on 13 interviews with software architects. It addresses questions such as: who decides the NFRs, what types of NFRs matter to architects, how are NFRs documented, and how are NFRs validated. The results are contextualized with existing previous work.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Collective awareness platforms and digital social innovation mediating consensus seeking in problem situations

In this paper we show the results of our studies carried out in the framework of the European Project SciCafe2.0 in the area of Participatory Engagement models. We present a methodological approach built on participative engagements models and holistic framework for problem situation clarification and solution impacts assessment. Several online platforms for social engagement have been analysed to extract the main patterns of participative engagement. We present our own experiments through the SciCafe2.0 Platform and our insights from requirements elicitation

Using mobile RE tools to give end-users their own voice

Researchers highlight end-user involvement in system design as an important concept for developing useful and usable solutions. However, end-user involvement in software engineering is still an open-ended topic. Novel paradigms such as service-oriented computing strengthen the need for more active end-user involvement in order to provide systems that are tailored to individual end-user needs. Our work is based on the fact that the majority of end-users are familiar with mobile devices and use an increasing number of mobile applications. A mobile tool enabling end-user led requirements elicitation could be just one of many applications installed on end-users' mobile devices. In this paper, we present a framework of end-user involvement in requirements elicitation which motivates our research. The main contribution of our research is a tool-supported requirements elicitation approach allowing end-users to document needs in situ. Furthermore, we present first evaluation results to highlight the feasibility of on-site end-user led requirements elicitation