Usability - a Full Life Cycle Perspective

In this paper, the applicability of Nielsen's ten usability heuristics to a system full life cycle is investigated. The challenge is to define usability for Internet-of-Things (IoT) type systems in a full life cycle context, specifically for a product's enabling system. Usability in a full life cycle is to ensure all users of a multidisciplinary system are acknowledged, and not only end-users. Enabling systems are most often neglected when considering usability as focus is on the end-product. A baseline is first developed (in principle) by combining results from literature and is then generalized for a larger system. It was observed that usability heuristics can be generalized and applied to a system full life cycle. The resulting generalized heuristics consider system users such as clients, developers and other beneficiaries. The value of usability in the system development phase (before operation and maintenance) should be able to alleviate the challenges encountered during development, as a literature study verifies. It is interesting to see that systems engineering practices address many usability challenges, with contextualization, constructivism, complexity reduction, agility and communication confirmed as additional usability factors.