Desenvolvimento de artefatos para a avaliação de dashboards de sistema de apoio a tomada de decisão focando em usabilidade e experiência do usuário

Abstract

Well-designed dashboards synthesize complex data, allowing users to quickly identify trends and patterns. To achieve their goals, these dashboards must be easy to use, enhancing users’ ability to understand, interact with, and extract insights from the presented data. This paper highlights the importance of dashboards in supporting decision-making, emphasizing the crucial role of user experience (UX) and usability in the effectiveness of such systems. In recent years, dashboards have become increasingly popular, with a significant rise in the number of these tools emerging in the market. This growth has encouraged developers to create their own tools and has also attracted the attention of researchers to this area. Despite their prominence, there is a need to propose technologies that can support developers and development teams in the process of designing and evaluating quality dashboards. While dashboards are on the rise, the technologies aimed at ensuring their quality and user satisfaction have not kept pace. The main objective of this master’s research is to propose quality attributes related to usability and user experience that can be incorporated during the dashboard development process. Following a literature review on dashboard quality attributes, a checklist was developed to assess the usability aspects of these systems. The checklist facilitates a structured and simple identification of usability issues, even by inexperienced users, serving as a robust evaluation tool based on quality attributes validated by previous literature. Additionally, an aggregated set of Design Patterns was proposed and associated with the checklist verification items. Both the inspection checklist and the design patterns were applied to evaluate and redesign dashboards proposed within an information system for decision-making at the multinational energy company Equatorial Energia. The results of this experience suggest the feasibility of considering these quality attributes to improve the ease of use of dashboards. To evaluate the UDASHBOARD checklist and the DP-DASHBOARD design patterns, an experimental study was conducted. The results indicated that participants considered the technology useful for identifying defects in dashboards; however, its ease of use could be improved. Furthermore, it was found that participants’ experience did not significantly influence the effectiveness and efficiency outcomes of the technique. Regarding the design patterns, results showed that, overall, the technology is easy to understand and useful in supporting dashboard design. However, the visual examples of some patterns could be improved to make them clearer for developers.