Making Software User Friendly: An Assessment of Data Entry Performance

This paper describes an investigation of the critical role of human factors in improving software usability and productivity. To Illustrate the types of improvements and their benefits, the human-computer interfaces of several software modules were subjected to human factors analyses, redesigned and recoded. A comparison using real operators showed that operators who used the modified programs completed transactions in 25 percent less time and with 25 percent fewer errors than operators who used the original programs.