The Human Side of Software as a Service: Building a Tighter Fit between Human Experiences and SOA Design Practices

Software as a Service (SaaS) is now recognized as an effective model for the development, deployment, and customization of software. It has been reported that it reduces the costs as well as ensures the long-term sustainability of software systems. Monolithic software systems are seen as a set of interrelated and geographically distributed services over the Internet. Developers and providers can easily customize services while being able to accommodate a large range of stakeholders. At the core of this service orientation of the whole field of software development are the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design principles. These principles detail what we should do, but not how and by whom it has to be done. From a human perspective -- all stakeholders -- we argue that the current SOA design principles can be linked and benefit from the user experience/user-centric design. Such combination can lead to a user experience-centric and SOA-based design approach that guarantees that SaaS is secure, yet trustable, useful, usable and accessible. In this position paper, we reviewed SOA/SaaS from the human dimension with the goal to bridging the gaps between SOA design principles and the User Experience (UX) design communities including Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and service design. One practical goal is to enhance the SOA, as a technological platform with elements of UX including the social aspects of their interactions within the organizational structure and processes.

I. Introduction

Service-oriented computing community proposes different definitions for a “service”, sometimes making this concept fuzzy. In a broad sense, Vargo and Lusch [1] defined a service as an application of specialized knowledge and skills, through deeds, processes, and performances for the benefits of an organization and its clients. A software as a service (SaaS) has been also defined differently. It can be seen then as specific arrangements of services (one or many interrelated services), data and resources needed to run these services. The goal is to create an added value for an organization while supporting business processes. SaaS has been also defined as software-distributed model, in which applications are hosted by a vendor or a service provider and made available to users over a network, typically the Internet. Users access services due to a thin client via a web browser.