Usability is a highly desired but often ignored software quality. Effective user interfaces tend to increase learnability, effectiveness and user satisfaction. But usability is often neglected in the early stages of software development and is thus frequently not address in a system's architectural design. Furthermore, because usability is often neglected or deferred, it is difficult to estimate the effort specifically spent on adding or improving usability mechanisms in the software architecture and in code. In this work, we present a case study where we analyze the impact of introducing a variety of usability mechanisms to a mobile application and we report on the architectural changes that must be made in the software architecture to accommodate them. We also report on the additional code required to implement these usability mechanisms and we investigate the users' satisfaction of combining and using several usability mechanisms in a mobile application. Finally, we evaluated user responses—both positive and negatives—to these usability mechanisms via a questionnaire involving 25 users from different roles and different organizations and including contextual interviews to analyze the qualitative responses of the subjects. Our results show that apart from the relatively modest modeling and coding effort, the combination of several usability mechanisms seems beneficial for users of mobile systems and increases the satisfaction during the interaction with the system.

中文翻译：

---

软件架构中的可用性影响：移动应用程序的案例研究

可用性是一个非常需要但经常被忽视的软件质量。有效的用户界面往往会提高可学习性、有效性和用户满意度。但是可用性在软件开发的早期阶段经常被忽视，因此在系统的架构设计中经常没有解决。此外，由于可用性经常被忽视或推迟，因此很难估计专门用于在软件架构和代码中添加或改进可用性机制的工作量。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个案例研究，我们分析了向移动应用程序引入各种可用性机制的影响，并报告了必须在软件架构中进行的架构更改以适应它们。我们还报告了实现这些可用性机制所需的额外代码，并调查了用户对在移动应用程序中组合和使用多种可用性机制的满意度。最后，我们通过一份涉及来自不同角色和不同组织的 25 名用户参与的问卷调查评估了用户对这些可用性机制的积​​极和消极的反应，并包括情境访谈以分析受试者的定性反应。我们的结果表明，除了相对适度的建模和编码工作外，几种可用性机制的组合似乎对移动系统的用户有益，并增加了与系统交互过程中的满意度。我们通过一份涉及 25 名来自不同角色和不同组织的用户的问卷评估了用户对这些可用性机制的反应——包括积极的和消极的——包括上下文访谈，以分析受试者的定性反应。我们的结果表明，除了相对适度的建模和编码工作外，几种可用性机制的组合似乎对移动系统的用户有益，并增加了与系统交互过程中的满意度。我们通过一份涉及来自不同角色和不同组织的 25 位用户参与的问卷调查评估了用户对这些可用性机制的正面和负面回应，其中包括情境访谈，以分析受试者的定性回应。我们的结果表明，除了相对适度的建模和编码工作外，几种可用性机制的组合似乎对移动系统的用户有益，并增加了与系统交互过程中的满意度。