Browsing by Subject "Usability"

Despite benefits and importance of ERP systems, they suffer from many usability problems. They have user interfaces that are complex and suffer from "daunting usability problems". Also, their implementation success rate is relatively low and their usability significantly influences this implementation success. As a company offering an ERP system to ferry operators was planning to renew the user interface of this system in future, we investigated usability of the current system so this could guide future implementation of the new user interface. We studied new and long time users by conducting sessions where the users told about their experiences, performed tasks with the system and filled usability questionnaire (System Usability Scale). Many novice and long time users reported problems. The scores from usability questionnaire show all but two participants perceived the usability of the system as below average and in adjective rating "not acceptable". Two users rated the usability as "excellent". We reasoned that there could be a group of users who use the system in such a way and in such context that they do not experience these problems. The results indicate novices have trouble, for example, navigating and completing tasks. Also some long time users reported navigation issues. The system seems to require that it’s users remember lots of things in order to use it well. The interviews and tasks indicate the system is complex and hard to use and both novices and experts face problems. This is supported by perceived usability scores. While experts could in most cases finish all tasks, during interview some of them reported problems such as finding products the customers needed, error reporting being unclear, configuration being tedious, and need for lots of manual typing, for example. We gave recommendations on what to consider when implementing new user interface for this ERP system. For example, navigation should be improved and users should be provided with powerful search tools. ERP usability is not studied much. Our study supports use of already developed heuristics in classifying usability problems. Our recommendations how to improve usability of the ERP system studied should give some guidelines on what could be done, although not much is backed by laboratory studies. More work is needed in this field to find and test solutions to usability problems users face.