Impact of Usability on Software Requirements and Design

Like any other quality attribute, usability imposes specific constraints on software components. We have empirically corroborated that software design and usability are related. Therefore usability features impacting design need to be considered from a functional viewpoint at requirements stage. But discovering and documenting usability features is likely to be beyond the usability knowledge of most requirements engineers, developers and users. We propose an approach based on developing specific guidelines that capitalize upon key elements recurrently intervening in the usability features elicitation and specification. Developers can use these guidelines to ask the appropriate questions and capture usability requirements information. This practice should lead to build software with higher usability.

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