Cost Effective Development of Usable Systems; Gaps between HCI and Software Architecture Design

Usability is considered an important quality attribute for software systems. To ensure a particular level of usability, a certain amount of time and money have to be invested; however this has proven to be expensive. Most of the costs spent on usability are spent after an initial development e.g. during maintenance. These high costs often prevent developers from meeting all the usability requirements. The challenge is therefore to cost effectively develop usable software e.g. minimize the costs & time spent on usability. We believe architecture analysis of usability is an important tool to achieve this. Our experiences with software architecture analysis of usability allowed us to identify a series of problems that explain why usability is not achieved cost effectively in current software development practice