Name of the participant: Tom Thaler
Description of the IT-research project: Today, the usability of (business) application software plays a significant role in the selection of appropriate products and represents an important differentiating feature that determines the competitiveness of software products to a considerable extent. In this context, usability is defined as the extent to which a software product can be used by a user to achieve his goals effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily in a given context.
The aim of the project is therefore to develop an approach for the targeted improvement of software usability based on the usage scenarios in the real day-to-day business of the customers and away from laboratory conditions. Each software product is designed to perform specific tasks and to achieve corresponding goals. Despite or precisely because of this, it must first be clarified which tasks the actual users perform by using a software product and how they achieve the corresponding goals. Process Mining offers suitable techniques to identify the procedures, tasks and goals of the end users in a process-oriented way and to present them in a human-readable way. In addition, points and criteria can be derived that influence the further course of the process.
In contrast to previous projects, which usually address an overall concept for the measurement of software usability, the focus of the project planned here is on the automated processing of the measurement results in general and the mining results in particular. A software tool to be developed (prototype) shall provide information about the deviation or similarity of the real usage scenarios and procedures of the end users to the reference processes of the software application. In addition, inter-organizational aspects, such as the compatibility of process interfaces in cross-organizational business processes, will be given special emphasis. Accordingly, the project planned here will take particular account of cross-organizational aspects. In this way, the practical procedures in different competing or cooperating companies will be examined in a dedicated way. In an inductive way, company- and industry-specific reference processes for the use of a software are created, which can be specifically addressed in software development and with regard to usability aspects. Thus, the initial acceptance of a software can be increased as well as its introduction and customizing phase can be significantly shortened.
Software Campus partners: DFKI, Software AG
Implementation period:01.04.2013 – 31.03.2015
