Design for experience innovation: understanding user experience in new product development

In providing a better experience to users in terms of product usage, we focus on the important concept of a user-centred design (UCD), and explore a new approach to user experience (UX), with the effort to understand experience-driven innovation. Based on the conceptual framework of experiential network and the results of multiple case studies covering 643 successfully designed products or services providing an optimised UX, we categorise the UX context into the following four representative types: individualisation, combination, integration, and ecosystem. Furthermore, we identify the essential UCD concepts that reflect the core needs and expectations of users in each of the designed contexts, that is, specialty, usefulness, usability, and fluency. Finally, we discuss the dynamic concepts that help achieve a successful experience innovation. We expect these findings to play a crucial role in the development of novel design concepts or strategies, not only to better understand the needs of contemporary users, but also to better understand the dynamics of innovation.     

Exploring Design Guidelines of Using User-Centered Design in Gamification Development: A Delphi Study

Gamification has become an increasingly important trend in the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) design. Applying the idea of user-centered design (UCD) in gamification is drawing more and more attention as the gamification design theoretical frameworks referencing UCD have been proposed. However, questions like “How should a gamification project be developed with specific UCD methods?” and “What design guidelines could be applied in the practice of using UCD in gamification project?” remain unanswered. We hereby conducted a Delphi study to explore design guidelines for using UCD in gamification development with knowledge from practice. The Delphi panel recruited for this study included 20 experienced gamification designers, who produced 28 initial guideline items in the pre-Delphi round. After three rounds of addition, modification, and deletion, 35 design guidelines were ultimately identified. Among these, 31 were found process-oriented and in line with the classic UCD processes and the rest four were about collecting feedback from the design user participants. The author discovered that some of the design guidelines showed consistency with existing theoretical frameworks or design principles about gamification and UCD, and meanwhile, some appeared to be different from the known gamification design knowledge. The research results extended and complemented current gamification design field by providing maneuverable guides and a better overall understanding of how to conduct a gamification project with UCD for gamification researchers and practitioners. In addition, by using the Delphi method in the field of gamification, this study provided a reference to future research in HCI design which needed to draw lessons from practical knowledge.     

DB2 Universal Database: A Case Study of a Successful User-Centered Design Program

This case study describes the application of user-centered design (UCD) principles to the development of a complex middleware software product-IBM's DB2(r) Universal Database. Motivated by trade press reviews highlighting ease-of-use problems, a multisite development team utilized IBM UCD to transform ease of use into a featured product attribute. This case study describes the initial application of UCD to DB21 and the positive business results that followed: critical acclaim, increased marketshare and user satisfaction, and increased support and adoption of UCD across the IBM database product family. Although ease-of-use objectives, target markets, and human factors practitioners' roles have evolved over 6 years and multiple versions of the product, DB2 continues to achieve positive results with UCD. In addition to the flexibility of the UCD methodology, other factors that influenced DB2's success included management support, resource commitment, cross-site communication and collaboration, detailed product specifications, and a focus on supporting user tasks.     

Modelling user experience with web sites: Usability, hedonic value, beauty and goodness

Recent research into user experience has identified the need for a theoretical model to build cumulative knowledge in research addressing how the overall quality or ‘goodness’ of an interactive product is formed. An experiment tested and extended Hassenzahl’s model of aesthetic experience. The study used a 2 × 2 × (2) experimental design with three factors: principles of screen design, principles for organizing information on a web page and experience of using a web site. Dependent variables included hedonic perceptions and evaluations of a web site as well as measures of task performance, navigation behaviour and mental effort. Measures, except Beauty, were sensitive to manipulation of web design. Beauty was influenced by hedonic attributes (identification and stimulation), but Goodness by both hedonic and pragmatic (user-perceived usability) attributes as well as task performance and mental effort. Hedonic quality was more stable with experience of web-site use than pragmatic quality and Beauty was more stable than Goodness.     

Embracing diversity in user needs for affective design

To develop product portfolios and affective design we need to understand the diversity in user needs. The challenge is how to predict what users want and how they will behave. One approach is to understand user emotions and affective needs, and predict successful product design that can match the needs. This paper discusses affect and its link to cognition. To provide a context, several theories are presented. A framework is described that incorporates characteristics of users, tasks, products, and use environment. The goal is to highlight the importance of emotions in enhancing the value of products. This research field, which we call Hedonomics, is new. There are many challenges in developing valid and reliable measurements of affect, which can influence human factors research as well as design.     

Towards useful and usable interaction design tools: CanonSketch

Despite all the effort dedicated to bringing better User-Centered Design (UCD) tools to market, current studies show that the industry is still dominated by tools that do not support the activities and workstyles of designers. Also, there is a growing need for interaction design tools aimed at software engineers, a problem related to bringing usability into the software engineering processes.

We propose a new workstyle model that can be effectively used to envision, design and evaluate a new generation of innovative interaction and software design tools, aimed at integrating usability and software engineering.

We illustrate the effectiveness of our model by describing a new tool, called CanonSketch, that was built in order to support UCD in terms of the dimensions in our workstyle model. We also describe an evaluation study aimed at contrasting paper prototyping with our tool as well as the level of workstyle support.     

Lessons learned from the design and evaluation of visual information-seeking systems

Designing information-seeking systems has become an increasingly complex task as today’s information spaces are rapidly growing in quantity, heterogeneity, and dimensionality. The challenge is to provide user interfaces that have a satisfying usability and user experience even for novice users. Although information visualization and interaction design offer solutions, many information-seeking systems such as online catalogs for libraries or web search engines continue to use outdated user-interface concepts developed decades ago. In this paper, we will present four principles that we identified as crucial for the successful design of a modern visual information-seeking system. These are (1) to support various ways of formulating an information need, (2) to integrate analytical and browsing-oriented ways of exploration, (3) to provide views on different dimensions of the information space, and (4) to make search a pleasurable experience. These design principles are based on our experience over a long period in the user-centered design and evaluation of visual information-seeking systems. Accordingly, we will showcase individual designs from our own work of the past 10 years to illustrate each principle and hence narrow the gap between the scientific discussion and the designing practitioner that has often hindered research ideas from becoming reality. However, most of the times search is only one part of a higher level user activity (e.g. writing a paper). Thus future research should focus on the challenges when regarding search in such a broader context. We will use the final two chapters to point out some of these challenges and outline our vision of an integrated and consistent digital work environment named Zoomable Object-oriented Information Landscape.     

A Walk-Up-and-Use Information System for the Sydney Olympics: A Case Study in User-Centered Design

The info information retrieval system was designed and developed for the XXVII Olympic Summer Games held in Sydney, Australia in September 2000. info provided journalists and broadcasters with information for planning their days at the games and producing their coverage of Olympic events. The user-centered design (UCD) team from the IBM Storage Systems Group was invited to work with the info system for the 2000 games and was able to do extensive UCD work, including working with journalists, broadcasters, and sports researchers from North America, Europe, and Asia. Throughout the development cycle the UCD team worked closely with the info programming team located in Madrid, Spain and with other teams in Sydney, Australia. Later, the UCD team joined a large cast of volunteers and professionals in providing support for info at the Sydney games. This opportunity allowed the UCD team to make observations and collect data on the usability of the system, and these indicate that info was indeed easy to use and that customers were very satisfied with the system. info's success was due to an extensive multidisciplinary team that included visual designers, human factors and human-computer interaction specialists, user research specialists, developers, marketers, IBM executives, and an active customer sponsor. The project demonstrates that application of UCD methods can improve product usability even when challenged with extremely dispersed teams and immovable deadlines.     

Secrets to success and fatal flaws: the design of large-display groupware

Research in the field of large-display groupware applications has yet to yield a killer app, a common look and feel for applications, or a set of broadly applicable design principles. It's therefore difficult to understand what constitutes a successful large-display groupware application and what affects their adoption. Although large-display groupware faces many of the same adoption and use challenges as conventional desktop groupware, how people perceive and interact with large-display groupware yields some unique challenges. We've built and evaluated several large-display groupware systems that address various workgroups, functions, and environments. This experience has given us broad expertise regarding the social dynamics and technical challenges surrounding large-display groupware's design. To enhance our understanding of these challenges, we've also undertaken a broad survey of existing large-display groupware systems to understand how their purpose, design, and deployment affect the success of their integration into everyday tasks and practices.     

基于我国端游产品的用户体验设计策略研究

在体验经济的时代环境下,探析客户端游戏产品设计中所运用的用户体验设计策 略,为今后的传统产品设计寻求新的设计视角。采用文献研究和案例分析法,以用户体验设计 发展为基础,以产品设计、用户体验设计、交互设计、设计心理学及感性工学中的方法理论为 依托,借助客户端游戏产品为研究对象,对其蕴含的用户体验设计策略进行研究。给出一种用 户体验的量化评价模型,并提出了能够提升客户端游戏产品用户体验的设计策略,在此基础上 为传统产品的创新设计提供新的启示和指导。     

Usability methods’ familiarity among map application developers

Developments in hardware and software have led to new innovative methods for visualising geospatial data. At the same time user-centred design (UCD) and usability engineering methods have a fundamental role in designing applications for new technical environments, which involve entirely new ways of interacting. However, applying methods from other research disciplines may not always be straightforward, as the product developers have to operate in a challenging interdisciplinary field. The aim of this study was to find out how usability engineering is currently included in the development of map services. Seven companies developing different types of map applications in Finland were interviewed. The results support the suitability of usability engineering for map application design, since by including the usability approach into the product design, while simultaneously taking into account the individuality and diversity of users and their tasks together with the characteristics of the maps, application developers are more likely to design products that have a higher quality of use. This study identifies the main occasions when the usability approach could be most beneficial. Furthermore, the benefits and challenges of including usability approaches in map application design are discussed. Preliminary ideas on what usability means in the context of map applications are also given. Finally, the importance for providing a basis for the further development of application-specific guidelines and techniques is addressed.     

科技触摸时尚——电子产品中的跨界设计浅析

时尚品牌与电子产品的融合设计是时下设计界的热门话题。本文着眼于当前诸多跨界的产品设计案例,从品牌、造型、用户体验等角度分析了跨界设计(crossover design)在电子产品设计中的应用手段,探讨了跨界设计在电子产品中的应用法则以及跨界设计的发展趋势。     

Agile product line planning: A collaborative approach and a case study

Agile methods and product line engineering (PLE) have both proven successful in increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing time to market under certain conditions. Key characteristics of agile methods are lean and highly iterative development with a strong emphasis on stakeholder involvement. PLE leverages reuse through systematic approaches such as variability modeling or product derivation. Integrating agile approaches with product line engineering is an interesting proposition which – not surprisingly – entails several challenges: Product lines (PL) rely on complex plans and models to ensure their long-term evolution while agile methods emphasize simplicity and short-term value-creation for customers. When incorporating agility in product line engineering, it is thus essential to define carefully how agile principles can support particular PLE processes. For instance, the processes of defining and setting up a product line (domain engineering) and deriving products (application engineering) differ significantly in practices and focus with implications on the suitability of agile principles. This paper presents practical experiences of adopting agile principles in product line planning (a domain engineering activity). ThinkLets, i.e., collaborative practices from the area of collaboration engineering, are the building blocks of the presented approach as they codify agile principles such as stakeholder involvement, rapid feedback, or value-based prioritization. We discuss how our approach balances agility and the intrinsic needs of product line planning. A case study carried out with an industrial partner indicates that the approach is practicable, usable, and useful.     

浅谈如何创造产品设计附加值

随着人们生活水平的不断提高,用户对产品的需求已经不仅仅是基本功能的需求,消费者更加追求产品的审美、情感和品牌价值等附加值。本文以产品设计附加值为中心,介绍产品设计附加值的定义、作用以及创造途径。在介绍产品设计附加值创造途径中,主要以经典的IPod播放器作为辅助说明案例。     

An Architecture Supporting Intelligent Mobile Healthcare Using Human-Computer Interaction HCI Principles

Recent advancements in the Internet of Things IoT and cloud computing have paved the way for mobile Healthcare (mHealthcare) services. A patient within the hospital is monitored by several devices. Moreover, upon leaving the hospital, the patient can be remotely monitored whether directly using body wearable sensors or using a smartphone equipped with sensors to monitor different user-health parameters. This raises potential challenges for intelligent monitoring of patient’s health. In this paper, an improved architecture for smart mHealthcare is proposed that is supported by HCI design principles. The HCI also provides the support for the User-Centric Design (UCD) for smart mHealthcare models. Furthermore, the HCI along with IoT`s (Internet of Things) 5-layered architecture has the potential of improving User Experience (UX) in mHealthcare design and help saving lives. The intelligent mHealthcare system is supported by the IoT sensing and communication layers and health care providers are supported by the application layer for the medical, behavioral, and health-related information. Health care providers and users are further supported by an intelligent layer performing critical situation assessment and performing a multi-modal communication using an intelligent assistant. The HCI design focuses on the ease-of-use, including user experience and safety, alarms, and error-resistant displays of the end-user, and improves user’s experience and user satisfaction.     

Event-enabled intelligent asset selection and grouping for photobook creation

The process of creating a photo product, such as a photobook, calendar or collage, from a large personal image collection requires intensive user effort. The primary goal of the current research was to develop an end-to-end solution to the problem of photo product generation that enables the user to complete the process with minimal edits, where the system intelligently selects assets and groups them before presenting the output to the user. The automation is driven by metadata extracted both from individual images as well as from sets of assets in a collection. In particular, we use an automatically detected event hierarchy to establish meaningful groupings in the assets, and to determine an appropriate grouping and pagination for the final product. We propose a novel intermediate construct, called a storyboard, which can be translated to different product types without recomputing the underlying metadata. In addition to chronological storyboards, we also describe a novel hybrid storyboard that joins chronological image presentation with groups of images of a common theme. A pagination algorithm uses the information in the storyboard and the product constraints to generate a product. Finally, the user is provided with a metadata-driven editing mechanism that makes it easy to change the auto-populated product. Given that the proposed system envisions user interaction in creating the final product, user studies are conducted to judge the usefulness of the system, where consumers use the system to generate a photobook with their own images.     

Cyber-physical systems challenges: a needs analysis for collaborating embedded software systems

Embedding computing power in a physical environment has provided the functional flexibility and performance necessary in modern products such as automobiles, aircraft, smartphones, and more. As product features came to increasingly rely on software, a network infrastructure helped factor out common hardware and offered sharing functionality for further innovation. A logical consequence was the need for system integration. Even in the case of a single original end manufacturer who is responsible for the final product, system integration is quite a challenge. More recently, there have been systems coming online that must perform system integration even after deployment—that is, during operation. This has given rise to the cyber-physical systems (CPS) paradigm. In this paper, select key enablers for a new type of system integration are discussed. The needs and challenges for designing and operating CPS are identified along with corresponding technologies to address the challenges and their potential impact. The intent is to contribute to a model-based research agenda in terms of design methods, implementation technologies, and organization challenges necessary to bring the next-generation systems online.     

基于UCD理论的教学设计研究

为了解决传统教学中忽视学生真实需求的问题,通过UCD软件设计与教学设计的类比,提出了在高校教学设计中借鉴UCD的设计思路,将教学设计当作软件产品设计,将学生作为最终目标用户,充分研究学生在教学中的需求,并在学生参与下,师生共同进行迭代式的教学设计。教学实践证明,在教学设计中融入UCD设计思想加强了师生交流,使教学设计能更好地符合学生心智模型,为改进课程教学设计、提高教学质量提供了有效途径。     

A task based ‘design for all’ support tool

The ‘design for all’ philosophy promotes the development of products that meet the requirements of a broader section of the population, including those who are older or disabled, to minimise the need for bespoke designs and individual customisations. Such an approach begins to meet the needs of a population containing an ever increasing proportion of these excluded groups, whilst providing opportunities to manufacturers to maximise the available market for any given product.Most design activity embodies some form of task analysis that involves identifying users and the tasks they perform. Computer based human modelling systems are becoming increasingly important in this task analysis role combined with the established ergonomics technique of fitting trials, in which a product or environment is evaluated through trials using a carefully selected user group.This research addresses the lack of existing data necessary for the accurate representation of human form and capability in the older and disabled populations for use in these modelling systems. A small-scale survey is being undertaken to collect this important information. In addition, existing modelling systems in this area rely on expert ergonomics knowledge in performing task based analysis, which in addition can be a time consuming and repetitive task. Methods are being developed to streamline this process and to place the emphasis on good design and ergonomics principles as opposed to ‘driving’ the system. These methods involve the development of a simplified process for computer based task analysis and a means of determining the percentage accommodated by any given design.Further research will eventually focus on extending the data collection, refining the task model and look at a means of suggesting design solutions in response to the analysis results.