Several recent studies of ERP system interfaces have confirmed that their poor usability hinders worker productivity, despite the huge investments companies make in user training and support. Usability challenges arise from the complexity of ERP systems, which are designed as a universal tool for a plethora of organizational practices and contexts. Learning to operate within an excessively vast terrain of ERP task pages and parameters is a significant challenge for most ERP users. Our proposed solution relies on the system itself to share task and process information in order to guide users through learning and performing their business tasks with the system. This perspective arises from employing the human–computer collaboration approach to the design of user interfaces, which we apply as a guiding framework for our research. In this paper, we present two interface components for providing ERP system users with task and process guidance: Automated Playback and Interactive Process Visualization. The novelty of our approach comes from using the history of past interactions to dynamically compose animated demonstrations of task interfaces and to provide an interactive graphical map of the current process being worked on by the user.

The development of the collaborative critique (CC) usability inspection method was driven by the need for systems to lessen the workload on their users. In the collaborative view of system–user interaction, the role of the system is expanded to that of a partner that must help its users achieve their goals. This perspective shifts the dynamic from focusing on the user’s ability to make effective use of the system to the system’s usefulness within a given task, user, and interaction context. The CC method consists of a walkthrough evaluation in which the questions answered at each step of the interaction assess the system’s collaborative strength. This method is further distinguished by the inclusion of questions that access the behavior of the system in error situations. This article provides a detailed description of the CC method and its application and demonstrates its usefulness in evaluating an interface.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are widely used but notoriously difficult to learn and master. The authors propose that a database approach to representing the system’s tasks, interface components, and usage logs in conjunction with the ERP domain data can serve as a foundation for improving system usability. The framework the authors designed supports automatic logging of user-system interactions and automated analysis of the logged data for enabling a variety of interface enhancements and assessments that can be performed dynamically by the system. Compared to existing work on usage logging, the authors’ framework expands the logging capabilities of ERP systems while providing a unifying basis for many different kinds of applications of log data.

We introduce a new usability walkthrough method called Collaborative Critique (CC), which is inspired by the human-computer collaboration paradigm of system-user interaction. This method applies a "collaboration lens" to assessing the system's behavior and its impact on the user's efforts in the context of the task being performed. We present findings from a laboratory evaluation of the CC method with usability practitioners, in which the results of the CC walkthrough were compared to a benchmark set of problems collected via user testing with two experimental Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system tasks. The development of this new usability evaluation method was driven by the need for an approach that assesses the adequacy of the system's support for reducing the user's cognitive and physical effort in the context of the interaction.

Corporate and academic communities have focused a great deal of attention on formalized approaches for creating, capturing, and propagating knowledge. Far less attention has been paid to the informal mechanisms that individuals share and employ to help them navigate complex processes in order to ‘get things done.’ In this paper, we examine the creation, use, and content of informal documents for supporting users of an enterprise resource planning system in a Fortune 500 company. We contend that such notes, which are commonly used for supporting information systems-related work, are an overlooked source of knowledgeability about organizational practices. This study is a first but necessary step in analyzing the types of information that can be derived from informal notes so that organizations can more fully utilize this largely untapped resource.

Abstract Given that time is money, Web searching can be a very expensive proposition. Even with the best search technology, the usefulness of search results depends on the searcher's ability to use that technology effectively. In an effort to improve this ability, our research investigates the effects of logic training, interface training, and the type of search interface on the search process. In a study with 145 participants, we found that even limited training in basic Boolean logic improved performance with a simple search interface. Surprisingly, for users of an interface that assisted them in forming syntactically correct Boolean queries, performance was negatively affected by logic training and unaffected by interface training. Use of the assisted interface itself, however, resulted in strong improvements in performance over use of the simple interface. In addition to being useful for search engine providers, these findings are important for all companies that rely heavily on search for critical aspects of their operations, in that they demonstrate simple means by which the search experience can be improved for their employees and customers.

Abstract Conventional wisdom holds that queries to information retrieval systems will yield more relevant results if they contain multiple topic‐related terms and use Boolean and phrase operators to enhance interpretation. Although studies have shown that the users of Web‐based search engines typically enter short, term‐based queries and rarely use search operators, little information exists concerning the effects of term and operator usage on the relevancy of search results. In this study, search engine users formulated queries on eight search topics. Each query was submitted to the user‐specified search engine, and relevancy ratings for the retrieved pages were assigned. Expert‐formulated queries were also submitted and provided a basis for comparing relevancy ratings across search engines. Data analysis based on our research model of the term and operator factors affecting relevancy was then conducted. The results show that the difference in the number of terms between expert and nonexpert searches, the percentage of matching terms between those searches, and the erroneous use of nonsupported operators in nonexpert searches explain most of the variation in the relevancy of search results. These findings highlight the need for designing search engine interfaces that provide greater support in the areas of term selection and operator usage.

Multimedia data has become readily available from a variety of resources, such as the Web, to users (ranging from naive to sophisticated) who need to select and to present the data in a way that is meaningful to their particular applications.Delaunay"" is our framework for querying and presenting multimedia data stored in distributed data repositories, including the Web.It is unique in combining user-defined layouts with ad hoc querying capabilities, thereby enabling users to tailor, in a simple way, the layout of virtual documents composed of retrieved mdimedia objects.In this paper, we focus on the object-oriented data models, on the declarative query languages, and on how the results of the queries to disparate resources are integrated to form coherent user-defined documents.

Visual query systems have traditionally supported a set of pre-defined visual displays. We describe the Delaunay system, which supports visualizations of object-oriented databases specified by the user with a visual constraint-based query language. The highlights of our approach are the expressiveness of the visual query language, the efficiency of the query engine, and the overall flexibility and extensibility of the framework. The user interface is implemented using Java and is available on the WWW.