ARREST: From work practices to redesign for usability

In this paper we discuss the redesign of a support management system deployed in a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) in the UK. The original system was not fulfilling its needs as it had not captured work practices in a way that was recognizable to the users. The advantages of the redesign inc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Expert systems with applications 2011-02, Vol.38 (2), p.1182-1192
Main Authors: Iqbal, Rahat, Shah, Nazaraf, James, Anne, Duursma, Jacob
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Design engineering
Expert systems
Learning
Management systems
Philosophy
Productivity
Redesign
Support management
Tasks
User-centred design and evaluation
User-requirements
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Summary:In this paper we discuss the redesign of a support management system deployed in a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) in the UK. The original system was not fulfilling its needs as it had not captured work practices in a way that was recognizable to the users. The advantages of the redesign included: improved usefulness; improved efficiency and productivity; reduced learning time; improved usability; and increased acceptance among users. The system is used to support complex and distributed cooperative activities taking place in an SME. We evaluated the current system and analysed work practices using a user-centred design and evaluation philosophy. In this paper we discuss how user needs are incorporated into the enhanced design of the support management system. The user-centred design techniques used in this research include interviews, questionnaires, observations and user tests. We present comparative evaluation results that show significant improvement in performance of user tasks using the redesigned support management system. The contribution of this paper is the presentation of a case study to show how a user-centred design and evaluation philosophy can lead to better requirements capture resulting in systems that more accurately capture the users’ conceptual models.
ISSN:0957-4174
1873-6793
DOI:10.1016/j.eswa.2010.05.011