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. Using the proposed improvement methods, a new user interface was developed in order to increase usability. The new user interface was a web-based system implemented using Microsoft ASP .NET MVC, and proper access control to the system was implemented. Previously, report setup was done via Microsoft Excel. Reliability increased, as the new user interface helps users to provide the correct input by giving the user selectable values or defining what type of value is expected, thereby reducing the number of errors experienced by the system. The updated system was released to the users. After a sufficient amount of time, the user acceptance rate was then compared with the initial user acceptance rate. The amount of users increased dramatically after the new user interface was released and the overall user acceptance increased from 30% to 70%. Qualitative results were obtained via a second round of user feedback that evaluated the state of the system after the improvements. The results showed an overall average improvement of 21.2% across all factors. The improvements in both the user acceptance percentage as well as the improvement in the average user ratings of the software factor confirm that the methodology was effective in increasing user adoption of software systems and all of the objectives were fulfilled. It was found, as suggested by literature, that increasing the PEOU could lead to an improve PU.