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

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

webQDA: qualitative data analysis software: usability assessment

The use of qualitative analysis to support software has been growing. The integration of these types of tools in research is accompanied by an increase in the number of software packages available. Depending on the design and research questions, researchers can explore various solutions available in the market. Thus, it is urgent to ensure that these tools, apart from containing the necessary functionality for the purposes of research projects, are also usable. This study presents an assessment of the usability of the qualitative data analysis software webQDA® (version 2.0). To assess its usability, the System Usability Scale (SUS) was used. The results indicate that the current version is "acceptable" in terms of usability. We therefore hope, with this assessment, to make decisions so as to improve the usability of the new version of webQDA® (version 3.0)

Human Computer Interaction and Usability in the new Participative Methodology for Marketing Websites

Technological devices and information and communications technology (ICT) have become the new tactic for communication, collaboration, and the exchange of knowledge and innovation between organizations and users. These devices include websites, system and application software, and mobile and portable devices. Nevertheless, it has been noted that these devices, including websites, still lack important functionalities and utilities, i.e. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and usability. HCI and usability are essential in any device to allow the user to complete his/her task(s) in less time and with high-quality performance. The absence of HCI and usability aspects in technology devices and ICT will lead users to become frustrated and dissatisfied, and their loyalty will be reduced. A new coherent methodology called the New Participative Methodology for Marketing Websites (NPMMW) was developed to prevent this problem. The HCI and usability aspects are combined in the design stage, in the NPMMW, to increase user acceptance of the website, and to reduce users’ dissatisfaction. This study employment an online survey (N=210) from an Australian information technology industry that allowed the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data. The study provided theoretically and practical significance contribution; that HCI and usability integration in the NPMMW would enhance users’ acceptance, satisfaction, trust, and loyalty, and would minimize users’ frustration and aggravation, likewise; the NPMMW methodology will assist designers and users to create an effective website that meet the requirements of users and designers. Finally, an overview of the NPMMW methodology is provided, together with proposals for further research

A systematic mapping study of HCI practice research

Human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has emerged as a research domain in the HCI field and is growing. The need to transfer HCI practices to the industry began significantly with the works of Nielsen on usability engineering. To date, methods and techniques for designing, evaluating, and implementing interactive systems for human use have continued to emerge. It is, therefore, justified to conduct a systematic mapping study to determine the landscape of HCI practice research. A Systematic Mapping Study method was used to map 142 studies according to research type, topic, and contribution. These were then analyzed to determine an overview of HCI practice research. The objective was to analyze studies on HCI practice and present prominent issues that characterize the HCI practice research landscape. Second, to identify pressing challenges regarding HCI practices in software/systems development companies. The results show that HCI practice research has steadily increased since 2012. The majority of the studies explored focused on evaluation research that largely contributed to the evaluation methods or processes. Most of the studies were on design tools and techniques, design methods and contexts, design work and organizational culture, and collaboration and team communication. Interviews, case studies, and survey methods have been prominently used as research methods. HCI techniques are mostly used during the initial phase of development and during evaluation. HCI practice challenges in companies are mostly process-related and on performance of usability and user experience activities. The major challenge seems to be to find a way to collect and incorporate user feedback in a timely manner, especially in agile processes. There are areas identified in this study as needing more research

A pattern-oriented and model-driven architecture for interactive systems

Day-to-day experiences suggest that it is not enough to approach a complex design equipped with design tips, guidelines, and hints. Developers must also be able to use proven solutions emerging from the best design practices to solve new design challenges. Without these, the designer is unable to properly apply guidelines or take full advantage of the power of technology, resulting therefore in poor performance, poor scalability, and poor usability. Furthermore, the designer might "reinvent the wheel" when attempting to implement a design solution. A number of design problems continue to arise, such as: (1) decoupling the various aspects of interactive systems (for example, business logic, the UI, navigation, and information architecture) and (2) isolating platform specifics from the concerns common to all interactive systems. In the context of a proposal for a Pattern-Oriented and Model-driven Architecture (POMA) for interactive systems, this thesis identifies an extensive list of pattern categories and types of models aimed at providing a pool of proven solutions to these problems. The models of patterns span several levels of abstraction, such as domain, task, dialog, presentation and layout. The proposed POMA architecture illustrates how several individual models can be combined at different levels of abstraction into heterogeneous structures which can then be used as building blocks in the development of interactive systems. This document is divided into six chapters: the first chapter presents a background and related work on "Patterns" in general and on various architectures for interactive systems development such as "N-tiers architectures", "Pattern-Oriented Design" (POD), "Pattern- Supported Approach" (PSA), and "Model-Driven Architecture" (MDA). The second chapter introduces the research topic with its objectives, its limits, the research methodology, and research steps. The third chapter describes primarily the most important parts of the research which is the development of a new architecture called Pattern-Oriented and Model-Driven Architecture, facilitating the development of interactive systems including fundamentals and key concepts, an overview, justifications versus N-tiers, POD, PSA, and MDA architectures and specifications. The fourth chapter describes architectural levels and categories of patterns used in POMA. The fifth chapter describes the categories of models used in POMA. The sixth chapter presents an exploratory case study applied to the architecture proposed in this research. The last chapter presents a conclusion on this research work and its expected evolution in the future

On data-driven systems analyzing, supporting and enhancing users’ interaction and experience

[EN]The research areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Architectures have been traditionally treated separately, but in the literature, many authors made efforts to merge them to build better software systems. One of the common gaps between software engineering and usability is the lack of strategies to apply usability principles in the initial design of software architectures. Including these principles since the early phases of software design would help to avoid later architectural changes to include user experience requirements. The combination of both fields (software architectures and Human-Computer Interaction) would contribute to building better interactive software that should include the best from both the systems and user-centered designs. In that combination, the software architectures should enclose the fundamental structure and ideas of the system to offer the desired quality based on sound design decisions. Moreover, the information kept within a system is an opportunity to extract knowledge about the system itself, its components, the software included, the users or the interaction occurring inside. The knowledge gained from the information generated in a software environment can be used to improve the system itself, its software, the users’ experience, and the results. So, the combination of the areas of Knowledge Discovery and Human-Computer Interaction offers ideal conditions to address Human-Computer-Interaction-related challenges. The Human-Computer Interaction focuses on human intelligence, the Knowledge Discovery in computational intelligence, and the combination of both can raise the support of human intelligence with machine intelligence to discover new insights in a world crowded of data. This Ph.D. Thesis deals with these kinds of challenges: how approaches like data-driven software architectures (using Knowledge Discovery techniques) can help to improve the users' interaction and experience within an interactive system. Specifically, it deals with how to improve the human-computer interaction processes of different kind of stakeholders to improve different aspects such as the user experience or the easiness to accomplish a specific task. Several research actions and experiments support this investigation. These research actions included performing a systematic literature review and mapping of the literature that was aimed at finding how the software architectures in the literature have been used to support, analyze or enhance the human-computer interaction. Also, the actions included work on four different research scenarios that presented common challenges in the Human- Computer Interaction knowledge area. The case studies that fit into the scenarios selected were chosen based on the Human-Computer Interaction challenges they present, and on the authors’ accessibility to them. The four case studies were: an educational laboratory virtual world, a Massive Open Online Course and the social networks where the students discuss and learn, a system that includes very large web forms, and an environment where programmers develop code in the context of quantum computing. The development of the experiences involved the review of more than 2700 papers (only in the literature review phase), the analysis of the interaction of 6000 users in four different contexts or the analysis of 500,000 quantum computing programs. As outcomes from the experiences, some solutions are presented regarding the minimal software artifacts to include in software architectures, the behavior they should exhibit, the features desired in the extended software architecture, some analytic workflows and approaches to use, or the different kinds of feedback needed to reinforce the users’ interaction and experience. The results achieved led to the conclusion that, despite this is not a standard practice in the literature, the software environments should embrace Knowledge Discovery and datadriven principles to analyze and respond appropriately to the users’ needs and improve or support the interaction. To adopt Knowledge Discovery and data-driven principles, the software environments need to extend their software architectures to cover also the challenges related to Human-Computer Interaction. Finally, to tackle the current challenges related to the users’ interaction and experience and aiming to automate the software response to users’ actions, desires, and behaviors, the interactive systems should also include intelligent behaviors through embracing the Artificial Intelligence procedures and techniques

On Data-driven systems analyzing, supporting and enhancing users’ interaction and experience

Tesis doctoral en inglés y resumen extendido en español[EN] The research areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Architectures have been traditionally treated separately, but in the literature, many authors made efforts to merge them to build better software systems. One of the common gaps between software engineering and usability is the lack of strategies to apply usability principles in the initial design of software architectures. Including these principles since the early phases of software design would help to avoid later architectural changes to include user experience requirements. The combination of both fields (software architectures and Human-Computer Interaction) would contribute to building better interactive software that should include the best from both the systems and user-centered designs. In that combination, the software architectures should enclose the fundamental structure and ideas of the system to offer the desired quality based on sound design decisions. Moreover, the information kept within a system is an opportunity to extract knowledge about the system itself, its components, the software included, the users or the interaction occurring inside. The knowledge gained from the information generated in a software environment can be used to improve the system itself, its software, the users’ experience, and the results. So, the combination of the areas of Knowledge Discovery and Human-Computer Interaction offers ideal conditions to address Human-Computer-Interaction-related challenges. The Human-Computer Interaction focuses on human intelligence, the Knowledge Discovery in computational intelligence, and the combination of both can raise the support of human intelligence with machine intelligence to discover new insights in a world crowded of data. This Ph.D. Thesis deals with these kinds of challenges: how approaches like data-driven software architectures (using Knowledge Discovery techniques) can help to improve the users' interaction and experience within an interactive system. Specifically, it deals with how to improve the human-computer interaction processes of different kind of stakeholders to improve different aspects such as the user experience or the easiness to accomplish a specific task. Several research actions and experiments support this investigation. These research actions included performing a systematic literature review and mapping of the literature that was aimed at finding how the software architectures in the literature have been used to support, analyze or enhance the human-computer interaction. Also, the actions included work on four different research scenarios that presented common challenges in the Human-Computer Interaction knowledge area. The case studies that fit into the scenarios selected were chosen based on the Human-Computer Interaction challenges they present, and on the authors’ accessibility to them. The four case studies were: an educational laboratory virtual world, a Massive Open Online Course and the social networks where the students discuss and learn, a system that includes very large web forms, and an environment where programmers develop code in the context of quantum computing. The development of the experiences involved the review of more than 2700 papers (only in the literature review phase), the analysis of the interaction of 6000 users in four different contexts or the analysis of 500,000 quantum computing programs. As outcomes from the experiences, some solutions are presented regarding the minimal software artifacts to include in software architectures, the behavior they should exhibit, the features desired in the extended software architecture, some analytic workflows and approaches to use, or the different kinds of feedback needed to reinforce the users’ interaction and experience. The results achieved led to the conclusion that, despite this is not a standard practice in the literature, the software environments should embrace Knowledge Discovery and data-driven principles to analyze and respond appropriately to the users’ needs and improve or support the interaction. To adopt Knowledge Discovery and data-driven principles, the software environments need to extend their software architectures to cover also the challenges related to Human-Computer Interaction. Finally, to tackle the current challenges related to the users’ interaction and experience and aiming to automate the software response to users’ actions, desires, and behaviors, the interactive systems should also include intelligent behaviors through embracing the Artificial Intelligence procedures and techniques

Guidelines for the usability evaluation of a BI application within a coal mining organization

Business Intelligence (BI) applications are consulted by their users on a daily basis. BI information obtained assist users to make business decisions and allow for a deeper understanding of the business and its driving forces. In a mining environment companies need to derive maximum benefit from BI applications, therefore these applications need to be used optimally. Optimal use depends on various factors including the usability of the product. The documented lack of usability evaluation guidelines provides the rationale for this study. The purpose is to investigate the usability evaluation of BI applications in the context of a coal mining organization. The research is guided by the question: What guidelines should be used to evaluate the usability of BI applications. The research design included the identification of BI usability issues based on the observation of BI users at the coal mining organization. The usability criteria extracted from the usability issues were compared and then merged with general usability criteria from literature to form an initial set of BI usability evaluation criteria. These criteria were used as the basis for a heuristic evaluation of the BI application used at the coal mining organization. The same application was also evaluated using the Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI) standardised questionnaire. The results from the two evaluations were triangulated to provide a refined set of criteria. The main contribution of the study is the heuristic evaluation guidelines for BI applications (based on these criteria). These guidelines are grouped in the following functional areas: visibility, flexibility, cognition, application behaviour, error control and help, affect and BI elements.Information ScienceM.Sc. (Information Systems