No abstract

The HCI community has developed guidelines and recommendations for improving the usability system that are usually applied at the last stages of the software development process. On the other hand, the SE community has developed sound methods to elicit functional requirements in the early stages, but usability has been relegated to the last stages together with other nonfunctional requirements. Therefore, there are no methods of usability requirements elicitation to develop software within both communities. An example of this problem arises if we focus on the Model-Driven Development paradigm, where the methods and tools that are used to develop software do not support usability requirements elicitation. In order to study the existing publications that deal with usability requirements from the first steps of the software development process, this work presents a mapping study. Our aim is to compare usability requirements methods and to identify the strong points of each one.

Nowadays there are sound Model-Driven Development (MDD) methods that deal with functional requirements, but in general, usability is not considered from the early stages of the development. Analysts that work with MDD implement usability features manually once the code has been generated. This manual implementation contradicts the MDD paradigm and it may involve much rework. This paper proposes a method to elicit usability requirements at early stages of the software development process such a way non-experts at usability can use it. The approach consists of organizing several interface design guidelines and usability guidelines in a tree structure. These guidelines are shown to the analyst through questions that she/he must ask to the end-user. Answers to these questions mark the path throughout the tree structure. At the end of the process, the paper gathers all the answers of the end-user to obtain the set of usability requirements. If it represents usability requirements according to the conceptual models that compose the framework of a MDD method, these requirements can be the input for next steps of the software development process. The approach is validated with a laboratory demonstration.

Usability is a key factor to create a quality product. However, there are few proposals to deal with usability requirements from the early steps of the software development process. This paper presents a mapping study to compare existing usability requirement methods and to identify strong points for each one.