Usability evaluation guidelines for business intelligence applications

Business Intelligence (BI) applications provide business information and drive decision support. To derive maximum benefit from BI applications, the applications need to be used optimally. Optimal use depends on various factors including the usability of the product. The documented need for BI usability research together with the practical need for BI evaluation guidelines 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 organisation. In a mining environment companies need to derive maximum benefit from BI applications, therefore these applications need to be used optimally and that places the focus on usability. The research is guided by the question: What criteria should be used 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 organisation a log of usability issues was compiled. The usability criteria 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 organisation. The same BI application was also evaluated using the Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI) standardised questionnaire. The results from the two evaluations were triangulated to provide 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, data quality and learnability.