View article

RITU AGARwAL, PRABUDDHA DE, ATISH P. SINHA, AND MOHAN TANNIRU significant body of knowledge on planning and designing better systems for nontechnical end users [9]. However, we know considerably less about the usability of the representations utilized by the toolsmiths of such systems—the systems developers. There appears to be an implicit assumption that usability is a concept that applies only to the ultimate consumers of information technology. Perhaps it is time to question this assumption and to examine the implications of usability for the technologies utilized by software developers. In some recent influential writing on usability, Adler and Winograd note that

“... all too often new technologies are introduced into the workplace without sufficient planning for their implications for the workforce”[1]. Anecdotal evidence suggests that object-orientation (OO) might be one such technology. It has …