A Software Architectural View of Usability Patterns

Usability is one of the key quality attributes in software development. The content of this paper is part of the research conducted within the European Union IST STATUS project, related to the development of techniques and procedures for improving usability of software architecture designs. In this paper, we will focus on the possible improvement of usability at software design time. For this purpose, we have identified, from both the literature and the project’s industrial partners’ experience, what we have called usability patterns. The usability patterns represent twenty usability mechanisms, for example, undo, cancel, multiple-languages, etc., which improve final system usability and have an effect upon the design of the software system in which they are implemented. We also present possible design solutions for incorporating the respective usability mechanisms into a software system design. The design solutions have been obtained by means of an inductive process that guarantees that these solutions are possible, albeit not necessarily the only solutions.