Exploring usability needs by Human-Computer Interaction patterns

Covering quality aspects such as usability through the software development life cycle is challenging. These "-ilities" are generally difficult to grasp and usually lack an appropriate quantifiability, which would ease their systematic consideration. We propose a pattern-based development method supporting the identification of usability requirements and their proper specification. By taking usability principles from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design patterns and incorporate them into patterns for software analysis (problem frames), we obtain a new kind of patterns applicable for requirements engineering: HCIFrames. They are used for exploring usability needs of a given problem situation.