Estudo exploratório sobre o design da usabilidade integrado ao design da arquitetura do software.

Abstract

Usability is an attribute of the systems quality that are easy to understand, to use, and attractive to end users. Incorporating usability recommendations during system development is not a trivial task. Since its incorporation impacts on aspects that go beyond the user interface, directly affecting the system’s functionalities and architecture. For this, it is necessary that usability also be considered during the design of the system architecture. Since future changes demand high costs, sometimes unviable to be realized. In this sense, an exploratory study was conducted to investigate how usability can be represented in the system architecture design. The study was conducted in an academic environment during the conduction of web and mobile application architecture projects carried out by ten teams of students of a Software Architecture discipline. The study was conducted into four stages: (i) selection of standards, where papers were selected from the literature that present standards for usability design integrated with the software architecture; (ii) training the participants, where classes and discussions were held on the selected standards; (iii) execution of the architectural design projects, in which the participants carried out the design stage of their systems architecture incorporating usability aspects; (iv) quantitative and qualitative analysis of the projects results carried out by the participants. The results indicated that there is a need for improvements in usability guidelines presented in the literature and a greater direction for decision making in the integration of usability in the software architecture. In addition, it was possible to explore alternative solutions of how to represent usability in architecture and team perceptions about motivations and challenges when integrating usability into software architecture.