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end users, and 5) an essential part of the system documentation for the maintenance of the
system.
The main focus of this chapter is to examine research on the
human factors
issues
in data modeling, that is, research that employs social science methods such as laboratory
experiments, observations, and interviews to evaluate and improve the
usability
of the sys-
tems. Batra and Srinivasan defi ne usability as “the ability of the user to represent a problem
in a computing environment and effectively work with that representation” (1992, p. 395).
Thus, two important research questions of human factors research on data modeling have
traditionally been as follows: 1) How do the characteristics of the available tools affect us-
ers' ability to succeed in their tasks (i.e., what is the level of usability of the tools?), and 2)
how satisfi ed are the users with the tools?
REVIEW OF PRIOR RESEARCH
In this section, we review the previous human factors research on data modeling. This
review is based on a careful analysis of existing studies published in academic journals or in
the Proceedings of the ICIS conference
2
that have
empirically
evaluated some aspect of the
usability
of conceptual data modeling tools and methods
3
. After a comprehensive search, we
identifi ed 31 articles published after (and including) Brosey and Shneiderman's early work
in 1978 (Brosey & Shneiderman, 1978). A summary table of these studies is presented in
Appendix A. The table includes a description of the independent variables (IV), dependent
variables (DV), research tasks, and the most important results.
First, we will discuss the typical research variables used in these studies, and then,
review the most important empirical fi ndings.
Figure 1: Widely used framework for human factors research on data modeling (see, for
example, Batra et al., 1990)
