UDRT-AD: uma técnica para projeto de diagramas de atividades visando a usabilidade em aplicações interativas

Abstract

The development of interactive applications has increased considerably. This may be related to the fact that these applications are increasingly supporting the daily activities of users. Designing interactive applications meeting quality criteria is a complex activity. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate one of the important quality attributes, usability, into the development process. By considering usability, we aim at designing interactive applications that are easier to use, that have high user acceptance rates and, consequently, improving the quality of these applications. This master’s dissertation presents the Usability Design Reading Technique for Activity Diagrams (UDRT-AD), that assists designers, being usability experts or not, in the design of artifacts (Activity Diagrams) that are generated in the early stages of the development process, aiming at improving the usability of the final application. To achieve this goal, the UDRT-AD technique has heuristics that guide and assist the designers in the construction of the diagrams. Furthermore, the UDRT-AD technique has usability guidelines that support the improvement of the application in terms of usability, through the designed activity diagram. As the UDRT-AD technique had its development supported by experimentation, this master’s degree dissertation also discusses: (a) how we created the UDRT-AD technique based on the results of a secondary study and an empirical study; (b) a pilot study in order to analyze the feasibility of applying the UDRT-AD technique; and (c) a feasibility study to analyze if the technique is feasible and has good performance.