Guerrilla HCI: using discount usability engineering to penetrate the intimidation barrier
Cost-justifying usability
An experiment to measure the usefulness of patterns in the interaction design process
INTERACT'05 Proceedings of the 2005 IFIP TC13 international conference on Human-Computer Interaction
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This paper discusses the role of HCI design patterns forsoftware development in the transaction processing (TP) applicationdomain. The concept of a design pattern, whilst popular in severalother fields including architecture and software engineering isrelatively new to human-computer interaction (HCI). The potentialof pattern languages as a vehicle for the dissemination of HCIdesign knowledge is becoming widely recognized within the HCIcommunity [Tidwell 1998; Van Welie 2001; Wesson 2001]. The TPapplication domain has its own set of unique design problems. Userinterface (UI) designers are faced with design challenges that arespecific to this application domain. This paper discusses thedevelopment of a pattern language for transaction processingsystems (TPS) that has been used to successfully design severalTPS.TPS refers to a class of programs that facilitates and managestransaction-oriented applications, typically for data entry andretrieval transactions. TPS are prevalent in most areas of theconstruction and engineering industries, from maintaining stocklevels in an electronics repair shop, to recording time andattendance information for a large engineering concern. TheTransaction Processing Pattern Language (PL) discussed in thispaper can be divided into two main categories: patterns that dealwith general UI design; and patterns that focus specifically on TP.In the context of this paper, our discussion focuses on the TPpatterns. Specifically the patterns related to data management(viewing, capturing and editing) are discussed.Usability is a key factor for the success of online TPS. Thesesystems must be designed to meet specific usability objectives andaccommodate a wide diversity of users. A heuristic evaluation wasconducted of the usability of the UI designs created using theTransaction Processing PL [Nielsen 1994]. This usability evaluationrevealed no significant usability problems. The user interfacedesign was found to meet its key usability objectives: readability,consistency, efficiency, productivity and error prevention. Patternlanguages and design patterns can represent a solution to thedesign problems facing UI designers. This PL has been used tofacilitate knowledge and skills transfer from a UI design expert tonovice UI designers in a South African software company. Whileconsiderable research must still be done to refine and extend theproposed PL, it nevertheless represents a significant contributionto understanding the problems facing designers of TPS and thepossible solutions.