Center for Information Technology Integration and Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2122
The gathering of a variety of human-oriented information is vital in the development stages of a software system. This information can be applied at a given stage to improve the human-computer interface of the software product. To reflect this, new categories of design and/or development effort need to be added to the traditional systems development stages. These efforts, termed user factor stages, differ from the traditional feasibility studies, requirements analyses, and tests that are currently conducted. The stages offer a flexible series of techniques, which can be compared and contrasted in terms of their expected information benefit, cost, and reliability of data obtained. As a concrete example, the development of a forms interface to a relational database management system illustrates these techniques.