Research On SAEU: A Usability-Oriented Architecture Model And Software Development Environment

Today, there are two main characteristics in the current information and technology development. One is that computing environment is becoming complex because system function is becoming stronger. The other is that computer using is becoming more and more popular. Today, common people outside enterprise have the possibility to do business by themselves (That is called self-business). Those tasks were often completed with the help of the people inside enterprise in the past. For example, they can buy goods, transfer their accounts between two banks using internet, ect. However, the server content and manipulating process that are shown in the UI are difficult for common people to understand because they lack of relative professional knowledge. They can't understand the content of computer's user interface or find an appropriate way to complete their task facing complex computer's user interface. So, the bottle-neck of application development oriented common people is how to make software's UI based on common people's knowledge and easy to use for common people.Traditional software usability research and practice are intended for user to use software system easily. Traditionally, they focus on how to make inside people of enterprise finish their task efficiently. To realize the goal, the content of UI is about application domain knowledge and relative manipulations. That is why current practical architecture is divided into two communicational parts according to its function: UI and application core (including application control, data storage). The application-oriented architecture is difficult to meet common people's need for usability because UI should show the content and manipulations based on common people's knowledge. To develop the software oriented common people, the dissertation proposes a Software Architecture Enhancing Usability (SAEU). Through introducing a middle cooperation level, SAEU uses an information structure to implement the transformation from user task to system application domain. Based on SAEU, the dissertation researches its developing environment, and has developed a JOOIGT toolkit to implement its UI's presentation level; SAEU models usability using aspect-oriented programming technology that is orthogonal to object-oriented programming technology in its middle cooperation level. The dissertation proposes five practical templates about how to use aspect-oriented programming to help developers implement software's usability and function from horizontal and vertical dimensions. The dissertation also explains the SAEU's efficiency and practicability in implementing common people's usability through a demo system.This paper was supported by the National High-Tech Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) (No.2006AA01Z328) and the Open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, The Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. SYSKF0704).