He is spearheading a new effort at Concordia to tackle this issue with a new research lab, graduate and undergraduate courses in user interface design and software usability, and collaboration with industry. Usability means the ease of learning and using a software system. It can include ease of switching to upgraded versions, and safety factors, such as the likelihood a user will develop repetitive strain injuries. Visual aspects, such as formatting and color, and psychological factors may also be involved. Seffah points out that lack of usability has significant and expensive consequences.
Companies spend a great deal of time and money on training employees to master complex software.
The increased productivity that computers are supposed to bring to the workplace is sometimes lost because the software is underutilized. Software developers also lose time and money if they have to go back to the drawing board because a program, or system, doesn't meet the needs of the end user. After CRIM decided to focus its efforts in other directions, he moved to Concordia last year. Here, he collaborates with T. Radhakrishnan, and Juergen Rilling, members of the Computer Science Department who have an interest in user interface design and usability engineering, and he is trying to attract researchers from other departments and universities, such as psychology and art, to this multidisciplinary field. One of his main objectives is to set up a human-centered software engineering lab where researchers can observe both the types of difficulties people experience using software, and how software developers engineers work using current software engineering tools and methods.