Usability-Supporting Architectural Patterns

Software architects have techniques to deal with manyquality attributes such as performance, reliability, andmaintainability. Usability, however, has traditionallybeen concerned primarily with presentation and notbeen a concern of software architects beyondseparating the user interface from the remainder of theapplication.In this tutorial, we present usability-supportingarchitectural patterns. Each pattern describes ausability concern that is not supported by separationalone. For each concern, a usability-supportingarchitectural pattern provides the forces from thecharacteristics of the task and environment, thehuman, and the state of the software to motivate animplementation independent solution cast in terms ofthe responsibilities that must be fulfilled to satisfy theforces. Furthermore, each pattern includes a samplesolution implemented in the context of an overridingseparation based pattern such as J2EE Model ViewController.