Usability Evaluation for Business Intelligence Applications: A User Support Perspective

Abstract

<jats:p>Business Intelligence (BI) applications provide business information to drive decision support. Usability is one of the factors determining the optimal use and eventual benefit derived from BI applications. The documented need for more BI usability research together with the practical necessity for BI evaluation guidelines in the mining industry provides the rationale for this study. The purpose of the study was to investigate the usability evaluation of BI applications in the context of a coal mining organization. The research is guided by the question: How can existing usability criteria be customized to evaluate the usability of BI applications. The research design included user observation, heuristic evaluation and a survey. Based on observations made during user support on a BI application used at a coal mining organization a log of usability issues was compiled. The usability issues extracted from this log was compared and contrasted with general usability criteria from literature to synthesize an initial set of BI usability evaluation criteria. These criteria were used as the basis for a heuristic evaluation of the BI application used at the coal mining organization. The same BI application was also evaluated using the Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI) standardized questionnaire. The results from the two evaluations were triangulated and then compared with the BI user issues again to contextualize the findings and synthesize a validated and refined set of criteria. The main contribution of the study is the usability evaluation criteria for BI applications presented as guidelines. These guidelines deviate from existing evaluation guidelines in the emphasis on information architecture, learnability and operability.</jats:p>

Aprendizaje automático y PYMES: Oportunidades para el mejoramiento del proceso de toma de decisiones

“…It is imperative to note that the advanced techniques tend to leverage on the ability of computer systems to perform tasks including processing the natural language as well as recognizing images from the learning experience. This is what is referred to as the artificial intelligence where computational tools to address the various tasks that traditionally required human sophistication [12]. Today, the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning is used in almost all sectors including in language translation, disease diagnosis and driving cars.…”

Augmenting the Business Intelligence Lifecycle Model with Usability: Using eye‑Tracking to Discover the why of Usability Problems

“…As an extension to standard usability guidelines, the unique nature and complexity of BI has led to the proposal of BI usability guidelines. These guidelines include the need for flexibility, in the sense that a user should feel in control of the application and the application should be customisable (Jooste, van Biljon and Mentz, 2014). Additionally, the system should be learnable to limit the load placed on the user's memory and to ensure that infrequent use does not prohibit effective and efficient use (Jooste, van Biljon and Mentz, 2014).…”

Usability evaluation of mobile applications; where do we stand?

“…Moreover, there should be supporting metrics for each of the defined usability dimension and descriptions on how each metric is related to its corresponding criteria. This will enhance easy understanding and applicability of the model in practice 19,20 .Therefore, it lacks supporting metrics for each dimension and guidelines for choosing suitable dimensions for a particular mobile application. In addition, it appeared that the model has not been tested to determine its applicability and accuracy.…”