Abstract
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have become essential in industry, yet the potential value created through system use can be illusive due to poor usability. Extensive interviews with users revealed that the underlying complexity of these systems manifests itself in unintuitive interfaces that are challenging to use. Given the lack of progress made with traditional design approaches, we propose a different tactic based on a system-user collaborative approach. This entails that the system acts as a collaborative partner by sharing knowledge, providing task-specific support, and adapting to user behaviors. Based on this collaborative view, we derive a set of principles for guiding the design of ERP systems and provide concrete examples demonstrating (1) how a lack of collaborativeness contributes to various usability problems, and (2) how our proposed design principles can be used to enhance the collaborativeness and, hence, the usability of ERP systems.
This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0819333. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Babaian, T., Lucas, W., Xu, J., Topi, H. (2010). Usability through System-User Collaboration. In: Winter, R., Zhao, J.L., Aier, S. (eds) Global Perspectives on Design Science Research. DESRIST 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6105. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13335-0_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13335-0_27
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