Usability Promotion in a Technical Project with Sparse Resources - A Case Study - Implementation plan

Sep 11, 2026

The paper explains how software usability for security-related functionalities is promoted and evaluated during the design phase of a software project built on middleware. It presents ongoing work in the GEMOM project, outlines early-stage challenges, and describes a planned approach to address them. The focus is on establishing an actionable usability implementation plan despite the lack of direct end users and limited resources for human factors studies.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPresentations

FormatPDF

Pages2

Reading Time1 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

1. Introduction

Software usability as a quality attribute

Challenges specific to middleware

2. Overcoming the Challenges for Usability

GEMOM project overview

Defining the challenges

Creating motivation

Usability Promotion in a Technical Project with Sparse Resources – a Case Study Kaarina Karppinen VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Kaitoväylä 1, PO Box 1100 FI-90571 Oulu, Finland +358 40 5487 058 [kaarina.karppinen@vtt.fi](kaarina.karppinen@vtt.fi) Marja Liinasuo VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Vuorimiehentie 3, Espoo, P.O. Box 1000 FI-02044 VTT, Finland +358 400 912711 [marja.liinasuo@vtt.fi](marja.liinasuo@vtt.fi) ABSTRACT In this paper, we describe how the usability of software functionalities are promoted and evaluated during the design phase of a software project developing security-related functionalities in amiddleware. The paper describes our work-in-progress in GEMOM project, challenges faced in the beginning of the project, and our planto overcome those challenges with a clearly defined usability implementation plan. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.9 [Software Engineering]: Management – Software quality assurance (SQA). General Terms Design, Human Factors Keywords software design, usability, scenarios, acceptability 1. INTRODUCTION The usability of a software product is becoming a widely recognised quality attribute in software development [1] . However, the conception of usability realised in projects is often quite narrow and, pertaining software design, restricted to attributes that are conceived as becoming topical to produce only in the later phases of software development. Anyhow, no effective product can be designed without taking into account also the “soft” human and context-related complexities, broadly speaking human factors, already in the beginning of the system development. Furthermore, in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community, software usability has primarily been concerned with the presentation of information, more precisely with user interface [2] . User interface can denote the visible part of the system and, less frequently, the interaction part of the system, i.e., the coordination of the information exchange between the end user and the system in Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. I-USED’08, September 24, 2008, Pisa, Italy both directions [3] . Either way, the easily neglected fact is that the usability of the tool is not only about the interface but also depends on other attributes rooted deeper in the character of the tool, e.g. the tasks it performs,. Middleware is a specific type of computer software that connects various software components or applications together. Typically other applications are conceived as users of amiddleware, and it has no direct human users, except for systems specialists or the like who usually install and maintain complex IT systems. Hence, usability in a middleware system development is harder to promote than of applications which have a direct interface towards a human user. As a consequence, the lack of “proper” users and the tradition of software development methodologies, which may see a user only as a means to elicit requirements, easily results in software development without any usability perspective. In the ongoing GEMOM project these obstacles are planned to be prevailed and one of the project’s aims is better usability of the end product without risking the security of it; a task that is proved to be hard to perform [4] . 2. OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES FOR USABILITY GEMOM (Genetic Message Oriented Secure Middleware) is a recently launched research project, lasting for 2½ years, that is co-funded by the European Commission and involves ten industry and research partners across Europe [5] . GEMOM is developing

FAQs

How does the paper promote and evaluate usability during the design phase?

It describes promoting usability of software functionalities while still in the design phase and establishing evaluation activities aligned with the project’s usability implementation plan.

What challenges did GEMOM face at the beginning regarding usability?

Challenges included promoting usability in a deeply technical project, lack of a clearly defined usability task, absence of direct end users for middleware, and very limited person-months allocated to human factors studies.

Why is usability harder to address in middleware systems than in applications with direct users?

Middleware typically has no direct human users and is mainly used by other applications, so usability perspective can be neglected compared with systems that explicitly present interfaces to people.

Sep 11, 2026

Uploaded by River Wang