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This paper describes market-related and social background of existing limitations in transferring usability engineering methods to software companies in Poland. Typical approaches of software vendors, developers, managers and users are shortly presented as possible reasons of low usability of many local software products. Providing information, guidelines and usability services are discussed as means for developing usability consciousness among all stakeholders involved in developing software for management support.
Software usability, management, Central-Eastern Europe, Poland
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
Social and economical changes in Poland in recent years resulted also in rapid development of software market, especially regarding products for business management. All kind of software products are now available, addressing diverse application areas from stock inventory to financial analysis, and targeted to companies of different size. However, saturation of the market does not have to mean that all products represent acceptable quality, and that market competition directly improves product usability.
The usage of usability engineering methods by Polish software developers is affected by several important characteristics of local software market: Most of software houses operate on regional markets, serving customers of alike size: big software houses deliver products and systems to big clients, while small software vendors serve small business sector, - almost all vendors sell mostly hardware, and application software still represents a minor part of their offer, - offered user support is very different in quality and often unreliable even from brand companies; in many companies user support is treated often as a burden, not producing any direct profit; often this support is offered as an extra service to be paid separately by the customer, - nevertheless, quality of user support nowadays becomes a key factor in vendor selection, especially in companies where long-term planning exists, and where they want to reduce costs of training, human errors and personnel-related damages of their IT (information technology) systems. The customers of software houses are usually not end-users but company managers, who make decision about vendor and software selection. Their ability to evaluate the real value of a particular offer is however very limited because: - they are usually not quite well informed about quality and usability of available application software, so they rely their decision on references from "the second hand" (like a similar company or local "gurus"), - their decision should be in principle based on estimated utility for their company [1], but in reality is affected by various subjective factors (like competency, costing, tax policy, time range of planning, etc.), but very seldom any benefits for end users (staff) are considered, - training, support and work environment are often first areas where managers search savings, especially in small, privately-owned companies, where short-term planning prevails and rotation of personnel is not considered as a problem, because private companies in Poland offer relatively attractive salaries despite of job instability, - costs of correcting implementation mistakes and regular maintenance (what means often emergency restoring the network system after its periodic breakdown) are relatively high; computer systems are seldom fully integrated with the information and management systems of the specific company, so system upgrade comes much sooner that it might be if usability issues were considered from the beginning of system development. Successful usage of management software is limited by following factors: - usually end-users are not involved in the purchase decision (more they are involved in development of applications for banks, telecommunications and other bigger clients, where user communities and implementation-related risks are larger), - as a result, users are often forced to adapt to the unfriendly system which will be not improved by developers until it completely collapses; small usability improvements are not covered by standard support contract (if any), so the company owners are not going to invest into IT more than they already did, - paradoxically, often large companies use their software in non-Polish-language versions, usually in order to create internal standard for data exchange between their branches in various countries; this presents additional difficulties for users, - however users usually know other similar products, computer workers are generally not usability-conscious as population,and they seldom resist in an organised way against low-usability tools imposed by their employee.
Presented situation is the result of : - managers' point of view which dominates in the system development and - lack of users' lobby in many companies (for instance trade unions seldom exist in private companies). In a big part this situation is also determined by developers' actual skills and habits, who: - focus primarily on testing the reliability of the code and/or on conformance issues (but only for domain-specific regulations like accounting standards, not ISO 9241 or other usability-related documents), - are often afraid of facing real users, who present mostly complaints and 'make so much stupid errors', - are usually not prepared for usability testing, interviewing users and negotiating specification requirements between the users and managers (in fact company managers pay for the product, not end-users); - often have heard about usability guidelines and methods [2], or documents like ISO 9241 [3], EC 90/270 [4] but had never used them in practice, because their customers do not refer to them either (even if the product needs radical redesign), and existing market pressures have strictly economical nature, - try to keep their sales level rather by increasing the labour price while orders drop, than by selling more cheaper copies of highly-refined product, which would be more adaptable to the needs of various customers. These habits and observations seem to be typical for most of small and medium software houses in Poland. For this reason usability consulting remains the main form of transferring usability knowledge to developers' community, but only in case of big and medium software companies. On the contrary, small software companies rely more on trial-and-error strategy than on systematic usability evaluation of their products, so they almost never order a formal usability preview of their products. Nevertheless, there is a surprisingly big number of high usability products coming from small companies, but this is rather due to some extremely talented developers than because of their usability-driven development process. or internal quality assurance procedures.
Currently all software engineers graduating from the Technical University of Gdansk have to undertake usability course, but there is no evidence how far the companies they work for really utilise their skill in this area. In turn, regulatory institutions, which might seem competent in testing the quality of software tools for mental work, demonstrate their lack of interest in this domain: they make only hygienic evaluations of computer hardware, skipping usability evaluations of commercial software products for VDU workstands. The same regards to conformance testing for ISO9241 [3]. For this reason Faculty of Management at the Technical University of Gdansk has recently established an independent testing centre for management software products. This center is aimed to join research and consulting in usability engineering area, as well as to cooperate with the university Computer Science Dept. in developing HCI courses also for developers from companies. Another function of the center will be offering its facilities for discount usability [2] testing for small software companies, whose budget is often limited but product usability can be critical for their success on the local market. The scope of planned services includes also workshops on requirements capturing, addressed to software developers. These activities may take years till they take effect, but results of this project are expected to have direct impact on software quality also in other application areas than business management, like for instance health service or emergency control centres.
Limited space of this paper allowed to present only a part of practical experiences from usability consulting of the author. These experiences however may be typical for the software markets in other countries of Central-Eastern Europe, what is likely to be discussed at the Development Consortium to which this paper is aimed.
1. Sikorski M. Quality Models in Usability Evaluation of Business Management
Software. In: Proceedings of 8th European Conference of Cognitive Ergonomics.
Granada (Spain) 10-13 Sept., 1996. 121-124.
2. Nielsen J. Usability Engineering. Academic Press, 1993.
3. ISO 9241 (1992). Ergonomic Requirements for Office Work with Display
Terminals (VDTs).
4. EC 90/270. EC Council Directive on the Minimal Safety and Health Requirements
for Work with Display Equipment.
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