USABILITY OF PROCESSES IN ENGINEERING DESIGN

Processes in Engineering Design are generally optimized towards efficiency, quality, costs, risks, etc., however an analysis that includes requirements from the process users' view is missing. Within the last years, the concept of usability has being introduced to examine business processes. This is a promising approach for Engineering Design, by involving process "users" (designers, engineers, software developers, project managers, etc.) in the process planning phase, several issues such as consistency flaws or counter-intuitive information flow can be identified beforehand. This paper aims to explore the transferability of usability concepts and evaluation methods to processes in the field of Engineering Design. The goal of this paper is to set a basis for further studies with regard on how to plan and design processes that interact efficiently, effectively and satisfactorily with the people involved. For this purpose ten process usability attributes are consolidated from the overlap between usability attributes (of products and systems) and process system properties. Moreover, five usability evaluation methods are examined on their applicability for evaluating design processes.