User-Centered Design: A Source of Sustainable Competitiveness for Software SMEs

As technology continues to become a more prominent part of our daily lives, the demand for different types of software systems continues to grow as well. Although discussion about the rise of technology often revolves around large, globalized companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, the majority of the businesses answering to the rising demand for software are small and medium sized enterprises(SMEs). These companies practice agile software development methods to develop software with smaller development teams to compete in the software market. The competitiveness of these companies is hindered however by the multitude of natural limitations that come with their smaller size, such as low financial capacities, and lower levels of overall expertise. The purpose of this thesis was to research the relationship between software SMEs and usercentered software design, and to arrive at a practical conclusion about how software SMEs could use this design method to sustain their competitiveness. The thesis first provided a literature review about the different limitations and advantages that are unique to software SMEs. The main limitations discussed in the review were a lacking ability to finance endeavors that failed to bring in immediate returns and the inability for developers to rely on the development practices found in literature. The review also discussed the strengths of being able to work in a smaller cohesive unit, and having an improved flow of ideas due to a more flexible company hierarchy. The literature review continued by defining and discussing the properties of user-centered design. This section of the literature review also went into subsections of discussing different aspects of the user-centered design process, such as its emphasis on contextual understanding, what makes it an iterative process, and usability testing. The section also reviewed the concept of discount usability engineering and the methods that it incorporates into the design process. The final part of the section introduces the concept of standardization as last resort method of design that larger companies are forced to use in their products. Once the literature review has provided the reader with material about software SMEs and the user-centered design process, the thesis introduces and explains a new problem centric design methodology that utilizes discount usability engineering to keep costs down. The thesis concludes that this methodology can provide software SMEs with a source of sustainable competitive advantage

Public Web Mapping: preliminary usability evaluation

April 5 - 7, 200

The Chicken and the Pig: User Involvement in Developing Usability Heuristics

Traditionally, users have not been involved in certain usability engineering methods, although they arguably are the most important stakeholders. This paper explores the possibility of involving users in developing a set of usability heuristics for a specific type of application, an activity they are not usually involved in. Using a qualitative approach based on interviews, a focus group, and an online survey, usability experts and software users evaluated existing sets of heuristics in terms of their applicability to a specific type of application and developed new heuristics to supplement them. The results indicate that the users provide a valuable contribution to the adaptation of existing heuristics to a specific type of application. Users add a new perspective and can address problem areas that usability experts, especially those with little or no experience with the specific application area, would not have identified

Participatory Scenario Generation: Communicating Usability Issues in Product Design through User Involvement in Scenario Generation\ud

Scenarios have proven to be a valuable tool in evaluating and communicating usability issues in consumer product design. Scenarios are explicit descriptions of hypothetical use situations. Realistic scenarios can serve as a valuable frame of reference to evaluate design solutions with regard to usability. To be able to achieve this required level of realism, involving users in scenario generation is essential. In this presentation we discuss how and where users can be involved in a scenario based product design process by means of examples of design projects that were executed by master students Industrial Design Engineering of the University of Twente. \ud \ud We distinguish direct and indirect scenario generation. In direct scenario generation the user is actively involved in a participatory scenario generation session: the scenarios are created together with users. Indirect scenario generation is an approach in which scenarios are created by designers based on common analysis techniques like observations and interviews. These scenarios are then offered to users for confirmation. Both types of user involvement in scenario generation can be aimed at either current use scenarios which describe the current situation or future use scenarios which include a new product design. \ud \ud The examples show that all strategies can be applied successfully to create realistic scenarios. Which strategy to choose depends among others upon risks and privacy issues, occurrence of infrequent events and availability of users. Furthermore, the variety of approaches shows that there is still a lot to explore with regard to benefits and limitations of the many techniques that can be applied in generating scenarios for consumer product design. We hope to contribute to this field by means of the research in our group and the work of students in the SBPD course\u

Usability Engineering and PPGIS - Towards a Learning-improving Cycle

July 21 - 2