KR13 Extended System Engineering – ESE: Integrating Usability Engineering in System Engineering

Abstract

AbstractUsers waste time trying to recover from their errors, resulting in productivity loss, reduced satisfaction and accidents. Common system engineering (SE) practices typically disregard system usability. The first part of this article presents real examples of the costs of having the user outside the system boundaries. Recently, researchers have proposed a new framework for complex system engineering (CSE), in which the users are included in the Extended System (ES). CSE considers the users as special cases of cognitive, self‐adaptive system elements. With this framework, the human factors (HF) may dominate the system performance and reliability. Current CSE methodology focuses on operability of systems with fuzzy boundaries, and it does not provide the means to solve the exemplified problems of simple, well defined interactive systems. The article presents a methodology for extended system engineering (ESE), a sub discipline of CSE specializing in the features and limitations of the human operators. Typically, usability professionals are concerned about ease of use during the initial stage more than about user errors. The multidisciplinary approach of having a usability expert in the development team falls short of solving the problems, unless the interface of the information flow between the usability experts and the system engineers is well defined. The article presents the principles and means for integrating usability in system engineering, so that user errors are eliminated, and their negative effects are reduced. Part of the principles and means presented here are applicable to the interaction between any elements of any system, regardless of their intelligence.