Modifying software systems to improve user adoption

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has driven the digitisation of large scale industrial and mining operations. This introduced the burden of large volumes of data to process. Data from industrial systems is usually processed by specialised systems and software. Numerous software systems exist to process this data and generate reports; however, users may be biased towards working with inefficient software. This leads to the problem of purpose-built software being underused. This study aims to provide a methodology to increase user adoption of software by addressing the factors affecting user acceptance of software released in a production environment. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) states that the Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) are the main factors affecting user acceptance. Existing studies were investigated, and it was found that few studies use TAM to improve software adoption. There is also no general methodology to obtain information about the current PU and PEOU of a system. Secondary factors regarding these two main factors were researched through literature. A methodology was developed to investigate the state of these secondary factors which uses a scoring and evaluation system. This relies on existing users to give feedback by the means of a questionnaire regarding underused systems in their current state. The factors from the ISO 25010 standard for software quality were selected as the basis for the questionnaires. Key factors are selected from the results and improvements to each factor are suggested. The system is evaluated again after the improvements are completed. The proposed methodology was applied on a case study of an industrial reporting system. The baseline for the system performance was obtained through feedback from existing users of the system using the questionnaire that was created. Most of the factors received a good score, however the low usability score was a clear outlier.