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Usability is a key quality attribute of successful software systems. Unfortunately, there is no common understanding of the factors influencing usability and their interrelations. Hence, the lack of a comprehensive basis for designing, analyzing, and improving user interfaces. This paper proposes a 2dimensional model of usability that associates system properties with the activities carried out by the user. By separating activities and properties, sound quality criteria can be identified, thus facilitating statements concerning their interdependencies. This model is based on a tested quality meta-model that fosters preciseness and completeness. A case study demonstrates the manner by which such a model aids in revealing contradictions and omissions in existing usability standards. Furthermore, the model serves as a central and structured knowledge base for the entire quality assurance process, e.g. the automatic generation of guideline documents.

The last decade marked the first real attempt to turn software development into engineering through the concepts of Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, with the goal of creating high-quality parts that could be joined together to form a functioning system. One of the most critical processes in CBSD is the selection of a set of software components from in-house or external repositories that fulfil some architectural and user-defined requirements. However, there is a lack of quality models and metrics that can help evaluate the quality characteristics of software components during this selection process. This paper presents a set of measures to assess the Usability of software components, and describes the method followed to obtain and validate them. Such a method can be re-used as a pattern for defining and validating measures for further quality characteristics.

The definition of usability has evolved over time. Some of the proposed definitions have been general, and apply to all types of interactive systems. Others were tremendously influenced by the experience of those who proposed the definitions and the domain in which they practiced usability. The definitions, in general, seem to agree that the targeted users, the complexity of the task, the type of technology (the interactive system), and environment (context of use) are the common factors that impact the usability of the interactive system. However, the attributes of usability that describe “a measure of how well actions are being performed with an interface ” do seem to differ from one definition to another. It is precisely these attributes that we wish to focus on in this paper: how to identify them?, why they tend to differ from one definition to another?, why identifying them is crucial to the success of the interactive system?, and finally, how identifying the usability attribute can lead to effective user-centred development?

Studies of software engineering projects show that a significant large part of the maintenance costs of software systems is spent on dealing with usability issues. Fixing usability problems during the later stages of development has proven to be costly since many changes cannot be easily accommodated by the software architecture. These high costs prevent developers from meeting all the usability requirements, resulting in systems with less than optimal usability. Explicit evaluation of a software architecture for its support of usability is a tool to cost effectively develop usable systems. It allows for more “usability tuning ” on the detailed design level, hence, preventing part of the high costs incurred by adaptive maintenance activities once the system has been implemented. Based on our investigations into the relationship between usability and software architecture, we developed a Scenario based Architecture Level UsabiliTy Analysis technique (SALUTA). The contribution of this paper is that it provides experiences and problems we encountered when conducting architecture analysis of usability at three industrial case studies performed in the domain of web based enterprise systems (e.g. e-commerce-, content management- and enterprise resource planning systems). We make some general observations and some architecture assessment related observations. For each experience, a problem description, examples, causes, solutions and research issues are identified.

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Software architectural evaluation becomes a familiar practice in software engineering community for developing quality software. Architectural evaluation reduces software development effort and costs, and enhances the quality of the software by verifying the addressability of quality requirements and identifying potential risks. There have been several methods and techniques to evaluate software architectures with respect to the desired quality attributes such as maintainability, usability and performance. This paper presents a discussion on different software architectural evaluation methods and techniques using a taxonomy. The taxonomy is used to distinguish architectural evaluation methods based on the artifacts on which the methods are applied and two phases (early and late) of software life cycle. The artifacts include specification of a whole software architecture and its building blocks: software architectural styles or design patterns. The role of this paper discussion is to review different existing well known architectural evaluation

Academic conferences play a key role in exchanging research ideas between participants and keeping researchers current. Many academic conferences, in various fields, are held annually. This leads to a dramatic increase in the number of submitted papers, and substantial effort to manage these many submissions. Such an intricate workflow of conference management results in frustration among many conference organizers. In this paper, we propose an online system to support the organization, management, and control of academic conferences.

conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official opinions, either expressed or implied, of the funding agencies or the U.S. Government. Keywords In spite of the goodwill and best efforts of software engineers and usability professionals, systems continue to be built and released with glaring usability flaws that are costly and difficult to fix after the system has been built. Although user interface (UI) designers, be they usability or design experts, communicate usability requirements to software development teams, seemingly obvious usability features often fail to be implemented as expected. The impact of usability issues becomes increasingly severe in all kinds of software as computer use continues to rise in the home, in the workplace, and in education. If, as seems likely, software developers intend to build what UI designers specify and simply do not know how to interpret the ramifications that usability requirements have for the deep structure of the software (i.e. the “software architecture”), something is needed to help to bridge the gap between UI designers and software

This is the preprint version of the following article: Michalski R., Grobelny J., Karwowski W. (2006). The effects of graphical interface design characteristics on human-computer interaction task efficiency. International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, 36, 959-977. doi: 10.1016/j.ergon.2006.06.013 The preprint html version is also available at: