Marcus Reul Diploma Thesis Student Email:   marcus.reul@rwth-aachen.de

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Interests / Personal Information

As a diploma thesis student from the Media Computing Group, I´m working at a manufacturer of test systems to examine how the application of HCI design patterns can improve the usability of industrial control systems.

Besides graphic design and usability, photography has become a favorite hobby and passion for me. You can have a look at my personal website to see some of my shots.

Supervisors:

My supervisors are Jonathan Diehl (Media Computing Group) and Matthias Salmen (VKA).

Diploma Thesis: Bringing Usability to Industrial Control Systems

Although many companies have realized that good usability becomes more and more an important selling factor, many of them haven’t yet found a way to address this quality criterion within their development process.

In literature there exist several approaches how usability can be addressed within the development of software (e.g., the DIA cycle and user tests) – however, many companies hesitate to apply these methods in practice. Main reasons for this behavior are high costs and the uncertainty about future payoffs.

I want to examine whether HCI design patterns can act as a low cost approach to bring usability knowledge into the software development process. The main objective of this study is to find out how a selected set of patterns can help developers and product managers to create products that are more consistent and easier to use.

Publications

2009

Marcus Reul, Jonathan Diehl, and Jan Borchers. Bringing Usability to Industrial Control Systems. In CHI '09: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM Press. .

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