Early-stage software design for usability

In this proposal, the author presents work to construct and evaluate a successful approach to explicitly drawing and communicating the connection between usability concerns and software architecture design. This approach for early-stage software design for usability is usability-supporting architecture patterns and their application and design framework, architecture pattern language for usability support (A-PLUS). The proposal will describe an iterative process of testing and revising USAPs to improve their usability and utility as a performance aid for software engineers designing software architectures to support usability concerns.