In this paper, we describe how the usability of software functionalities are promoted and evaluated during the design phase of a software project developing security-related functionalities in a middleware. The paper describes our work-in-progress in GEMOM project, challenges faced in the beginning of the project, and our plan to overcome those challenges with a clearly defined usability implementation plan.
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This working context resulted in two practical questions, involving also some matters of principle, with no direct answer for the usability expert participating in a pre-defined project. Firstly, how to motivate usability studies in a project without direct end users? Secondly, how to perform usability studies with sparse resources?
The first problem to be solved was the motivation for usability studies, related with the problem of having no direct end users for a middleware. Hence, the eventual end users as well as the outline of a plan for usability promotion had to be defined.
In order to clarify the definition of a user in our project, we started
by creating a more detailed picture about the various users. The
preliminary version of users was based on the usage distance
between the user and the middleware. Three levels of users were
found: (
The predefined project plan stated that user acceptance shall be obtained with the help of scenarios; the new technical solutions would be interpreted into scenarios of usage, which would then be evaluated with the users. This way user acceptance, i.e. the worth of the technical solutions planned to be realised, as experienced by the future users, could be found out. With no user interface to evaluate, a reasonable choice was to concentrate on the functionalities of the middleware as seen by the human user. This choice was also meaningful regarding the method chosen, as it is easier to describe verbally the chain of events than the attributes of a user interface.
The other problem, sparse resources for usability studies, could be compensated by harnessing technical experts to assist in usability evaluation. Consequently, usability study had to be planned extremely carefully as no prior knowledge of usability could be expected from other project members. In this project, case studies provide the human users for usability studies. The usability expert acts as a supervisor who plans and analyses the usability implementation and its results. For instance, she instructs the case study leaders to reflect with the user representatives what aspects regarding usability and security are important from the viewpoint of the user in their case study.
The theme throughout the usability plan is to realise it mainly by non-usability experts. Hence, a stepwise approach was chosen. The main idea is to perform usability studies as early in the project as possible so that the studies could have an actual effect on the middleware functionalities perceivable by human users. The process steps described below are accompanied by practical instructions produced by the usability expert so that the tasks in question can be performed. 1. Case study representatives are to define and describe who are the users affected by the functioning of the middleware in their case study. 2. Technical experts are to describe the technical solutions from the perspective of the users, i.e. the effect of the solution as can be perceived by the human users. 3. Leader of each case study is to produce the scenarios with the users. For that purpose, a description about the functionalities from the human point of view is provided.. 4. The case study leaders are to send the scenarios to the usability expert who will check their meaningfulness and return the checked and possibly corrected scenarios with focused questions related with each scenario. 5. Users in each case study are to answer the questions, and the answers will be sent to the usability expert who will analyse them and produce a report about user acceptance. So far, after having finished the first step of the process, challenges have mainly been related with the understanding of terms that have different meanings in HCI and SE (Software Engineering) approaches. Hence, special care has been taken when discussing about users or scenarios in this project. “User” means human users for HCI but may mean applications for SE. “Scenario” in turn denotes short stories describing relatively freely working process from the human user’s viewpoint in HCI [e.g. 6], compared with the system description that is more technically oriented in SE [e.g. 7].
This paper describes a work-in-progress, and more will be learned when the project is progressing.