Human factors: its place in system development methods

Interest in the needs of end-users has been growing for some years, leading to a host of notations, tools and approaches for the design of user interfaces. Unfortunately such techniques have remained isolated from traditional system development methods. The latter concentrating on functionality concerns. Thus, there remains a void between the approaches available for the specification and development of the two main components of any interactive information system. Namely, the application software that provides the storage, manipulation and dissemination of information and the user interface software that makes this functionality accessible to the enduser. This paper discusses the distinction between functionality centred and user centred approaches and makes a first pass attempt at reconciliation.