Writing usability hooks : an experience report with aspect-oriented programming and usability

Abstract

Incorporating usability from the inception of systems development is strongly advocated. Notwithstanding the argument that usability reduces development cost, no clear strategy from a technical perspective has been developed. It has been found that usability is still a secondary concern in the development process. In this paper we will demonstrate that by using aspect-oriented programming we can successfully separate usability concerns from functional concerns. Aspect-orientation is flexible enough to allow usability features to be designed and implemented separately in parallel or retrospectively.