Usability through Software Design

Over the past two decades, the HCI community has proposed specific features that software applications should include to overcome some of the most common usability problems. However, incorporating such usability features into software applications may not be a straightforward process for software de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering 2013-11, Vol.39 (11), p.1582-1596
Main Authors: Carvajal, Laura, Moreno, Ana M., Sanchez-Segura, Maria-Isabel, Seffah, Ahmed
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Architecture (computers)
Communities
Computer architecture
Computer programs
Developers
Guidelines
Human computer interaction
Product design
Software
software design
software design patterns
Software development
Software engineering
Software usability
Studies
Systems design
Systems development
Unified modeling language
Usability
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Summary:Over the past two decades, the HCI community has proposed specific features that software applications should include to overcome some of the most common usability problems. However, incorporating such usability features into software applications may not be a straightforward process for software developers who have not been trained in usability (i.e., determining when, how, and why usability features should been considered). We have defined a set of usability guidelines for software development to help software engineers incorporate particular usability features into their applications. In this paper, we focus on the software design artifacts provided by the guidelines. We detail the structure of the proposed design artifacts and how they should be used according to the software development process and software architecture used in each application. We have tested our guidelines in an academic setting. Preliminary validation shows that the use of the guidelines reduces development time, improves the quality of the resulting designs, and significantly decreases the perceived complexity of the usability features from the developers' perspective.
ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2013.29