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

Agile user stories enriched with usability

Usability is a critical quality factor. Therefore, like traditional software teams, agile teams have to address usability to properly catch their users experience. There exists an interesting debate in the agile and usability communities about how to achieve this integration. Our aim is to contribute to this debate by discussing the incorporation of particular usability recommendations into user stories, one of the most popular artifacts for communicating agile requirements. In this paper, we explore the implications of usability for both the structure of and the process for defining user stories. We discuss what changes the incorporation of particular usability issues may introduce in a user story. Although our findings require more empirical validation, we think that they are a good starting point for further research on this line

Proposal and Validation of Usability Model for Component Based Software System

Increasing demand of rapid and cost effective development of software system has increased the demand of Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE). In CBSE, software system is developed by using existing components. These components can be in-house components or third party components. To develop a Component Based Software System (CBSS), it is important to select the suitable component in such a manner that the components of the software system do not affect each other. To increase the acceptance of the CBSS among the users and the market value of the software industries, it is important to increase the usability of the CBSS. Several usability models have been proposed for traditional and object-oriented software system (OOSS), but there is no usability model for CBSS. Existing traditional and object-oriented models can’t be perfectly suitable for CBSS because of the unique characteristics of the components. This paper presents a usability model (UMCBSS) for CBSS. The proposed usability model is based on most significant usability factors. These factors are analysed from CBSS quality models. With the help of proposed model, usability is evaluated by using two different techniques i.e., centroid method and bisector method in MATLAB. Experimental results are also validated by using Center of Gravity (COG) and Mean-Max method. With the help of the proposed model, developers of the CBSS will be able to measure the usability of CBSS and to remove the usability flaws from the software system

Reuse of a usability functionality implementation in web applications

Volumen dedicated to CENTERIS 2013 - Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems / ProjMAN 2013 - International Conference on Project MANagement/ HCIST 2013 - International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and TechnologiesSoftware system usability is recognized as a quality attribute related not only to the user interface but also to applications design. In this paper we analyse the feasibility of designing and programming reusable solutions for implementing usability features that have a major impact on design. We develop case studies to find common application scenarios, responsibilities, classes, methods, attributes and chunks of code, which we use to propose reusable solutions specified as patterns. In this paper we report the results for the progress feedback usability functionality.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation Tecnologías para la Replicación y Síntesis de Experimentos en IS (TIN2011-23216) and Go Lite (TIN2011-24139) projects

Implementación de una solución reutilizable para una funcionalidad de usabilidad

Versión electrónica de la ponencia presentada en la XVII Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y de Bases de Datos (JISBD’2012), celebrada en 2012 en AlmeríaLa usabilidad es un atributo de calidad y un aspecto crítico en los sistemas de software. Se ha establecido que algunas de las recomendaciones para mejorar la usabilidad dadas desde el campo de la Interacción Persona Ordenador tienen impacto en el diseño de software. En este artículo presentamos la implementación de una solución reutilizable para realizar una funcionalidad de usabilidad con alto impacto en el diseño: Abortar Operación. Desarrollamos tres aplicaciones web como casos de estudio, incluimos esta funcionalidad de usabilidad y buscamos elementos comunes en las implementaciones. Encontramos escenarios de aplicación, responsabilidades, clases, métodos, atributos y trozos de código comunes en los tres desarrollos. Con base en estos hallazgos, proponemos elementos reutilizables para incorporar la funcionalidad de usabilidad en el análisis, diseño y programación. Formalizamos la solución como un patrón de diseño y patrones de programación en tres lenguajes: PHP 5, Java y Visual Basic .NET.Este trabajo ha sido financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España a través de los proyectos Tecnologías para la Replicación y Síntesis de Experimentos en IS (TIN2011-23216) y Go Lite (TIN2011-24139)

Crowdsourcing, Cognitive Load, and User Interface Design

Harnessing human computation through crowdsourcing offers a new approach to solving complex problems, especially those that are easy for humans but difficult for computers. Micro-tasking platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk have attracted a large on-demand workforce of millions of workers as well as hundreds of thousands of requesters. Achieving high quality results and minimizing the total task execution times are the two main goals of these crowdsourcing systems. In this paper we study the effects of cognitive load and complexity of user interface design on work quality and the latency of system. Our results indicate that complex and poorly designed user interfaces contributed to lower worker performance and increased latency

Toward a closer integration of usability into software development: a study of usability inputs in a model-driven engineering process

Even though the benefits of usability have widely been proven, it seems that development-oriented companies face many difficulties to introduce usability practices into their defined development processes. This paper describes the overall methodology deployed as an attempt to achieve a closer integration of usability practices in the software development process. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is used as a basis for this integration. Providing a precise framework composed of models and transformations, it allows to track usability problems and to highlight where exactly they occur in the development process. We will thus be able to link every step of the process to specific ergonomic inputs and to study their consequences on the usability of the generated system. Because MDE will only be used as a way among others to investigate some hypotheses on usability and User-Centered Design (UCD) in general, our results are expected to provide valuable and generic information on usability and UCD processes