Reusable Solutions for Implementing Usability Functionalities

Abstract

Usability is a software systems quality attribute. Although software engineers originally considered usability to be related exclusively to the user interface, it was later found to affect the core functionality of software applications. As of then, proposals for addressing usability at different stages of the software development cycle were researched. The objective of this paper is to present three reusable solutions at detailed design and programming level in order to effectively implement the Abort Operation, Progress Feedback and Preferences usability functionalities in web applications. To do this, an inductive research method was applied. We developed three web applications including the above usability functionalities as case studies. We looked for commonalities across the implementations in order to induce a general solution. The elements common to all three developed applications include: application scenarios, functionalities, responsibilities, classes, methods, attributes and code snippets. The findings were specified as an implementation-oriented design pattern and as programming patterns in three languages. Additional case studies were conducted in order to validate the proposed solution. The independent developers used the patterns to implement different applications for each case study. As a result, we found that solutions specified as patterns can be reused to develop web applications.

Impact of usability mechanisms: An experiment on efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction

“…Although the Abort Operation mechanism is costly for software developers to implement [61,62], its usability benefits appear to justify its implementation. If the Abort Operation mechanism is adopted, user-system interaction improves significantly in terms of productivity (speed with which tasks are performed), effectiveness (task completion) and satisfaction (help perception and mechanism comfort).…”

“…With regard to HCI recommendations with an impact on software design, there are studies [61,62] proposing reusable artefacts to implement three usability mechanisms (ABR, PFB and PRF). They use case studies to evaluate the solution.…”

“…According to implementation effort data, Progress Feedback tends to be costly to implement [61,62]. On this ground, it should not be adopted in the software system if project resources are limited.…”

“…The functionality of each usability mechanism depends on a combination of use cases identified in previous related works [61,62] and called application scenarios. For ABR, for example, we selected the FormCancelOpButtonUnsavedChanges, that is, a cancel button on the form that checks for changes and whether or not the changes should be saved.…”

“…The inclusion of additional components leads to increased development costs and time for implementing each mechanism. Rodríguez et al [61,62] report that some mechanisms are more or less expensive to implement than others, leading to different impacts in terms of development time and cost. For example, ABR and PFB are more costly to implement, while ABR is more expensive than PFB.…”