How friendly is ‘user-friendly’?

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Brophy, Hugh F.¹

Note: [1] Hugh F. Brophy is Chief of Statistical Services in the United Nations Statistical Office. He completed his undergraduate degrees at the Australian National University and did graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania. He served as statistician and programmer in the Australian government and in the Computing Research Centre in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. In 1970, he was elected Fellow of the Australian Computer Society. He has published numerous articles on statistical computing and is a member of the Governing Council of the International Association of Statistical Computing.

Abstract: Claims of ‘user-friendliness’ have been made on behalf of generalised software packages for many years. Although there was a vague consensus as to what this entailed, there was little attempt to describe the concept in any comprehensive or rigorous fashion. The seminar on integrated statistical information systems and related matters (ISIS '84) discussed the subject, with respect to the personality of a user-friendly system, its adaptibility and its skill in communicating. Examples of good and poor features of user-friendliness serve illustrative purposes, and recent attempts to quantify user-friendliness demonstrate growing awareness of the problem.

DOI: 10.3233/SJU-1984-2407

Journal: Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 407-415, 1984