Designing automation products for better usability can produce obvious benefits for users.
But it can also lead to savings for automation vendors. One example can be seen in work done recently by Pia Stoll, an industrial software systems researcher at ABB Corporate Research, in Vasteras, Sweden, in conjunction with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in Pittsburgh.
Read more in this article at Automation World.
For those interested in the relation between usability and software architecture, my colleague in this work–Bonnie John of the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University–gave a talk a while ago at Stanford on the work. You can see her talk on YouTube:
Usability and Software Architecture: The Forgotten Problems
- Len Bass, SEI
Posted in Quality Attribute Analysis
Wanted: software architects to participate in Carnegie Mellon survey.
We are designing a tool to help software architects evaluate their architecture designs for specific usability issues. We are looking for software architects to look at our design and take a brief online survey about your opinions of the design.
In user tests of a prototype of our tool, software architects at a major European development organization estimated they received a 17:1 ROI on time they spent using the tool to evaluate a design for a product line architecture. An open-source version of the tool should become available for distribution in the near future.
Participation in the survey should take less than 30 minutes. Your responses will be kept confidential. To participate, please go to http://tinyurl.com/mfnvu6.
If you have any questions or would like further information, please contact egolden@cmu.edu. Thanks!
- Len Bass, SEI
At SATURN 2009 Pia Stoll from ABB described the use of a tool to support evaluating a software architecture for certain aspects of usability. The abstract of her talk is here. In the ABB experience, the architect used the tool for 6 hours and estimated it saved him 5 weeks of effort.
A version of this tool is now available for dowload. You can find it at here.
– Len Bass, SEI
