Disseminating Usability Design Knowledge through Ontology-Based Pattern Languages

Usability patterns represent knowledge about known ways to design graphical user interfaces that are usable and meet the needs and expectations of users. There is currently a plethora of usability patterns published in books, private repositories and the World-Wide Web. The dominance of pattern discovery efforts has neglected the emerging need to organize the patterns so they can become a proactive resource for developing interfaces. This paper presents an approach using Semantic Web concepts that turns informal patterns into formal representations capable of supporting systematic design methods. Preliminary research is described that aims to turn loosely coupled pattern collections into strongly coupled pattern languages that help organize usability knowledge into a form that is easily and widely disseminated. This in turn can be used to facilitate the accumulation of usability development knowledge. 1 Usability Patterns as an Interface Design Resource The development of interactive software systems, i.e. systems with significant user interface components, is currently faced with a dilemma. Design for usability is becoming increasingly important to the success of software systems, but software developers are usually poorly trained in human factors and usability issues. Education, use of HCI specialists in the development process, and iterative development processes aimed at evaluating and improving the user interfaces [18] are necessary and cannot be fully replaced. But the abundance of errorprone and poorly designed user interfaces that exist in modern software systems indicates that complementary techniques are needed to disseminate usability design knowledge and best practices early in the design and development process. There is no lack of information and guidance on the design, development, and evaluation of user interfaces. Usability guidelines, patterns, principles, books, Web pages depicting good and bad examples, databases and various repositories are examples of both the plethora of knowledge and proliferation of formats that have been used to disseminate usability design knowledge. But current approaches to representing usability knowledge are document-based, at best supported with hypertext tools and/or Web page catalogs. These passive representations rely on individual developers to know of the existence of relevant knowledge sources, extract useful information, and understand how and when the obtained resources should be applied. As the size of the body of knowledge continues to grow in the current fractured manner, this method becomes, or has already become, untenable. Tools and techniques are needed that create an interconnected corpus of knowledge with a degree of agreement within the community and that can be refined and evolved to meet the ever changing demands of business and technology domains. The main objectives of this research are to: 1) construct formal computational frameworks for creating interconnected corpora of usability knowledge; and 2) build tools that put contextappropriate usability knowledge at the fingertips of software designers and usability specialists so they can be used early and throughout the design and development process.