Usability through System-User Collaboration

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have become essential in industry, yet the potential value created through system use can be illusive due to poor usability. Extensive interviews with users revealed that the underlying complexity of these systems manifests itself in unintuitive interfaces that are challenging to use. Given the lack of progress made with traditional design approaches, we propose a different tactic based on a system-user collaborative approach. This entails that the system acts as a collaborative partner by sharing knowledge, providing task-specific support, and adapting to user behaviors. Based on this collaborative view, we derive a set of principles for guiding the design of ERP systems and provide concrete examples demonstrating (1) how a lack of collaborativeness contributes to various usability problems, and (2) how our proposed design principles can be used to enhance the collaborativeness and, hence, the usability of ERP systems.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: DESRIST
• Authors: Tamara Babaian, Wendy T. Lucas, Jennifer Xu, Heikki Topi
• Keywords: DESRIST 2010, Education, Enterprise Resource Planning, Erp Systems, System-user Collaborative Approach