Usability Patterns in Software Architecture

Over the years the software engineering community has increasingly realized the important role software architecture plays in fulfilling the quality requirements of a system. Practice shows that for current software systems, most usability issues are still only detected during testing and deployment. To improve the usability of a software system, usability patterns can be applied. However, too often software systems prove to be inflexible towards such modifications which lead to potentially prohibitively high costs for implementing them afterwards. The reason for this shortcoming is that the software architecture of a system restricts certain usability patterns from being implemented after implementation. Several of these usability patterns are “architecture sensitive”, such modifications are costly to implement due through their structural impact on the system. Our research has identified several usability patterns that require architectural support. We argue the importance of the relation between usability and software architecture. Software engineers and usability engineers should be aware of the importance of this relation. The framework which illustrates this relation can be used as a source to inform architecture design for usability.