Abstract
Claims of ‘user-friendliness’ have been made on behalf of generalised software packages for many years. Although there was a vague consensus as to what this entailed, there was little attempt to describe the concept in any comprehensive or rigorous fashion. The seminar on integrated statistical information systems and related matters (ISIS '84) discussed the subject, with respect to the personality of a user-friendly system, its adaptibility and its skill in communicating. Examples of good and poor features of user-friendliness serve illustrative purposes, and recent attempts to quantify user-friendliness demonstrate growing awareness of the problem.
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