Improving the modelling of human-centric aspects of software systems: a case study of modelling end user age in wirefame designs

Taking into account the diverse human aspects - gender, age, emotions, personality, language, culture, physical and mental challenges, etc - is critical towards achieving more human-centric design of software systems. Human-centric aspects affecting software have long been underestimated or even ignored as a result of the lack of in-depth capture and understanding during development. The use of technology has become the norm and the range of users has increased from just adults to children as well as seniors. Modelling frameworks are methods to represent the way a software system should be defined, and to date, little research has been done on age-related issues within modelling frameworks. In this paper, we investigate how human-centric aspects regarding age can be better modelled by extending these modelling frameworks. We introduce an extension to wireframe-based designs so that they can cater for decisions regarding age within the modelling framework. We have evaluated this modelling extension using multiple questionnaires as well as usability testing by using the extended age-modelling wireframe approach to design a news app. Questionnaires were used to evaluate the requirements of the users and developers for the extended wireframes. Our analysis shows that when using our extended wireframes, developers can cater for different user types and their accessibility needs easily and therefore users can use the prototypes with more ease.