A design science approach to an HCI research project

Usability is an important and determinant factor in human-computer systems acceptance. Usability issues are still identified late in the software development process, during testing and deployment. One of the reasons these issues arise late in the process is that current requirements engineering practice does not incorporate usability perspectives effectively into software requirements specifications. The main strength of usability-focused software requirements is the clear visibility of usability aspects for both developers and testers. The explicit expression of these aspects of human-computer systems can be built for optimal usability and also evaluated effectively to uncover usability issues. This paper presents a design science-oriented research design to test the proposition that incorporating user modelling and usability modelling in software requirements specifications improves design. The proposal and the research design are expected to make a contribution to knowledge by theory testing and to practice with effective techniques to produce usable human computer systems.

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