Designing software architectures for usability

Usability is increasingly recognized as a quality attribute that one has to design for. The conventional alternative is to measure usability on a finished system and improve it. The disadvantage of this approach is, obviously, that the cost associated with implementing usability improvements in a fully implemented system are typically very high and prohibit improvements with architectural impact. In this tutorial, we present the insights gained, techniques developed and lessons learned in the EU-IST project STATUS (SofTware Architectures That supports USability). These include a forward-engineering perspective on usability, a technique for specifying usability requirements, a method for assessing software architectures for usability and, finally, for improving software architectures for usability. The topics are extensively illustrated by examples and experiences from many industrial cases.