Lessons from Ideation: Where Does User Involvement Lead Us?

Firms are increasingly involving users in new product development (NPD). Their product users frequently provide solution information, such as new product ideas. However, these users are often considered a homogeneous group of ordinary users; their individual abilities and the specific input they provide for NPD are not yet well understood. The goal of this paper is to determine whether different types of users are differently predisposed to produce ideas. We derive hypotheses regarding the possible outcome of involving different user types in idea generation tasks from the current literature on customer integration into NPD. In a quasi‐experimental setting, we test our assumptions on 93 users, who generate ideas in a smart home context. The results indicate that users’ contribution depends on their specific domain knowledge, which is broadly understood as knowledge of a specific area that influences ideation towards solutions in this domain. We distinguish between four types of users: those with high trend awareness, high technical skills, high technical innovativeness, and high ethical reflectiveness. We find that users with high technical skills are more likely to produce ideas that are technically feasible. Trend‐aware and technically innovative users produce ideas of greater originality. Ethically reflective users tend to come up with ideas that will have a positive impact on society.     

Perceptions of system development failures

According to the expectation failure theory, information system failures can occur during development or during system use and may be viewed differently by various stakeholder groups. This premise is examined via a survey of system developers and system users about their perception of frequency of system development problems. The data indicates that users and developers of information systems perceive certain problems at different levels of occurrence.     

A fuzzy decision support system for digital camera selection based on user preferences

Mobile phones have been the most rapidly spreading development in the field of communication and information technologies over the past decades. Nowadays, digital cameras have taken their place. The wide product range in the market, each with numerous heterogeneous technical attributes, complicates the selection of the most convenient camera for end-users. The aim of this work is to provide end-users with a decision support framework for selecting the best digital camera according to their preferences. End-users and photography experts use subjective assessments when determining their requirements and making their evaluations. The proposed decision support tool is built on the basis of fuzzy set theory. The imprecision of the subjective assessments are transformed to fuzzy triangular numbers. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and fuzzy compromise programming methodologies are applied in order to determine the relative weights of sub-criteria and criteria and to rank the digital camera alternatives, respectively.     

Adaptive Techniques for Universal Access

This paper discusses the contribution of adaptive techniques to Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction. To this effect, the paper revisits the concept of Universal Access, briefly reviews relevant work on adaptive techniques, and follows their application in efforts to provide accessibility of interactive systems, from the early, product- and environment-level adaptation-based approaches, to more generic solutions oriented towards Universal Access. Finally, the paper highlights some of the research challenges ahead. The normative perspective of the paper is that adaptive techniques in the context of Universal Access have the potential to facilitate both accessibility and high quality interaction, for the broadest possible end-user population. This implies the design of systems that undertake context-sensitive processing so as to manifest their functional core in alternative interactive embodiments suitable for different users, usage patterns and contexts of use. Such a capability needs to be built into the system from the early phases of conception and design, and subsequently validated throughout its life cycle.     

Selecting users for participation in IT projects: Trading a representative sample for advocates and champions?

The selection of users for participation in IT projects involves trade-offs between multiple criteria, one of which is selecting a representative cross-section of users. This criterion is basic because trading it for other criteria means basing designs on information biased toward some user groups at the expense of others. Based on interviews in development and customer organizations we find that their criteria for user selection favor persons who can contribute to the progress of the IT project over persons who are representative of the full range of users. A highly valued contribution from participating users is the ability to advocate a vision for the system and champion its organizational implementation. A survey in one customer organization shows that respondents’ personal traits explain up to 31% of the variation in their experience of aspects of the usability of a recently introduced system. Thus, unless participating users are representative as to these personal traits, IT projects may, inadvertently, bring about systems that will fail to satisfy many users.     

User-defined information sharing for team situation awareness and teamwork

Abstract

Team members have different roles in various scenarios to maintain situation awareness. A collaborative system should therefore provide appropriate information to the appropriate person at an appropriate time. Considering the mismatch between the designed and actually used information, this paper proposed that users should define what information to share with their team-mates. Thirty-six participants, who formed eighteen teams, used both the traditional and user-defined shared displays to perform failure diagnosis on the context of nuclear power plants. The user-defined shared display exhibited shorter diagnosis time without significant difference in correctness. Information quality, instead of quantity, was positively correlated with team mutual awareness. This study provides empirical evidence that user-defined information sharing is effective at improving operator’s diagnosis performance, so the users should be able to tailor the information based on requirements.Practitioner Summary: To support team situation awareness and teamwork, the present study proposed that users should define what information to share with their team-mates. The laboratory experiment shows that user-defined information sharing shortens operator diagnosis time without degrading correctness. Information quality appears more important than information quantity in enhancing team mutual awareness.     

Integration of human factors and ergonomics during medical device design and development: It's all about communication

Manufacturers of interactive medical devices, such as infusion pumps, need to ensure that devices minimise the risk of unintended harm during use. However, development teams face challenges in incorporating Human Factors. The aim of the research reported here was to better understand the constraints under which medical device design and development take place. We report the results of a qualitative study based on 19 semi-structured interviews with professionals involved in the design, development and deployment of interactive medical devices. A thematic analysis was conducted. Multiple barriers to designing for safety and usability were identified. In particular, we identified barriers to communication both between the development organisation and the intended users and between different teams within the development organisation. We propose the use of mediating representations. Artefacts such as personas and scenarios, known to provide integration across multiple perspectives, are an essential component of designing for safety and usability.     

The PROTEVS approach: A short presentation of background,principles and methods

Prototyping is not a new approach to computer-based information system development. It is just one technique among many used in system design. What might be new is for what purpose prototyping is used. The purpose could be to achieve a more user controlled system development and to give the future users a tool that will enable them to fully participate in not only the work with requirements specifications, but also in the actual systems design and organisational change. This paper describes a working model of an approach-the PROTEVS model-in which it is recommended that the future system users design their own prototype systems. The prototypes may act as both requirements specifications and solutions for actual change. This alternative approach aims to offer a basis for new ways of action for future users as participants in the design, evaluation, and change of a workplace. A suitable environment for the approach to act within is also described—a local design shop.     

Enhancing personal communication with spatial haptics: Two scenario-based experiments on gestural interaction

Haptic gestures and sensations through the sense of touch are currently unavailable in remote communication. There are two main reasons for this: good quality haptic technology has not been widely available and knowledge on the use of this technology is limited. To address these challenges, we studied how users would like to, and managed to create spatial haptic information by gesturing. Two separate scenario-based experiments were carried out: an observation study without technological limitations, and a study on gesturing with a functional prototype with haptic actuators. The first study found three different use strategies for the device. The most common gestures were shaking, smoothing and tapping. Multimodality was requested to create the context for the communication and to aid the interpretation of haptic stimuli. The second study showed that users were able to utilize spatiality in haptic messages (e.g., forward–backward gesture for agreement). However, challenges remain in presenting more complex information via remote haptic communication. The results give guidance for communication activities that are usable in spatial haptic communication, and how to make it possible to enable this form of communication in reality.     

基于短期记忆与遗忘系数的用户个性化建模方法研究

搜索引擎的一个标准是不同的用户用相同的查询条件检索时,返回的结果相同。为解决准确性问题,个性化搜索引擎被提出,它可以根据用户的不同个性化特征提供不同的搜索结果。然而,现有的方法更注重用户的长时记忆和独立的用户日志文件,从而降低了个性化搜索的有效性。获取用户短时记忆模型来提供准确有效的用户偏好的个性化搜索方法被广泛采用。首先,根据基于查询关键词的相关概念生成短期记忆模型;接着,基于用户的时序有效点击数据生成用户个性化模型;最后,在用户会话中引入了遗忘因子来优化用户个性化模型。实验结果表明,所提出的方法可以较好地表达用户信息需求,较为准确地构建用户的个性化模型。     

Adding semantic modules to improve goal-oriented analysis of data warehouses using I-star

The success rate of data warehouse (DW) development is improved by performing a requirements elicitation stage in which the users’ needs are modeled. Currently, among the different proposals for modeling requirements, there is a special focus on goal-oriented models, and in particular on the i* framework. In order to adapt this framework for DW development, we previously developed a UML profile for DWs. However, as the general i* framework, the proposal lacks modularity. This has a specially negative impact for DW development, since DW requirement models tend to include a huge number of elements with crossed relationships between them. In turn, the readability of the models is decreased, harming their utility and increasing the error rate and development time. In this paper, we propose an extension of our i* profile for DWs considering the modularization of goals. We provide a set of guidelines in order to correctly apply our proposal. Furthermore, we have performed an experiment in order to assess the validity our proposal. The benefits of our proposal are an increase in the modularity and scalability of the models which, in turn, increases the error correction capability, and makes complex models easier to understand by DW developers and non expert users.     

基于事件的虚拟现实用户体验评估方法研究

近年来,随着虚拟现实(Virtual Reality,VR)技术的逐渐成熟,我国VR产业处于高速增长的态势。虽然VR的发展为内容设计提供了许多新的可能性,但由于VR应用的设计不成熟,VR行业的从业者们仍面临着严峻的挑战,VR中的设计仍需要通过用户使用来验证是否可行。因此,用户体验(User Experience,UX)研究对于成功设计VR软件至关重要。同时,随着用户对内容质量要求的提高,VR内容是否有足够的吸引力将在很大程度上影响用户体验,决定了用户是否会进行更进一步的VR体验。因此,如何评估VR用户体验并找到影响用户体验的内容对于提高用户体验和用户黏性至关重要。目前,对VR的研究集中在硬件和软件的改善上,对内容设计的关注较少,对用户体验的评价也没有统一且明确的标准。文中尝试找出用户体验和用户特性以及VR内容之间的关联。首先,定义了4种类型的VR交互事件,并设计了一份问卷来收集测试者的用户特性及其主观评价。其次,将80名测试者分成两组,在固定的时间内体验两种类型的VR产品,在实验过程中,测试者的客观生理数据与参与实验的整个过程都被记录下来。最后,采用统计学方法和改进的Prism算法,找...     

A situation model to support awareness in collaborative design

The concept of awareness was introduced to underline the importance of shared knowledge and enhance collaborative work. Actors require much knowledge about their work situation and their collaborators’ activities in order to complete their own activities successfully. This paper first contributes to a detailed literature review about the concept of awareness. This review helps to identify key awareness-related requirements for the development of collaborative systems. The second contribution is related to the proposal of a generic situation model that is based on the concept of entities, interactions and specific roles. This new conceptual framework intends to favor situation awareness and support shared representations. It concerns both technical and organizational design activities and describes the collaborative situations from multiple views and at different organizational levels (project, team and individual). The proposal's interest and its feasibility for use in the development of collaborative systems are demonstrated by instances related to a case study and by analyzing the potential satisfaction of the identified awareness-related requirements. To sum up, the paper offers a synthesis of key context-related concepts and a generic model for the representation of collaborative situations to increase awareness.     

基于好友亲密度的用户匹配

用户匹配的目的是检测来自不同社交网络的用户是否是同一个人.现有的研究主要集中在用户属性和网络嵌入上,而这些研究方法往往忽略了用户与好友间的亲密关系.因此,文中提出一种基于好友亲密度的用户匹配算法(FCUM).该算法是一种半监督、端到端的跨社交网络用户匹配算法,其中注意力机制被用于量化用户与好友之间的亲密度.好友亲密度的...     

Using and managing multiple passwords: A week to a view

Security policies are required that protect information from unauthorised access, and also respect challenges users face in creating, and particularly managing, increasing numbers of passwords. This paper investigates real password use in the context of daily life. It presents the results of an empirical study where participants completed a password diary over 7 days, followed by debrief interviews to gain further knowledge and understanding of user behaviour. The results reported relate to how many passwords are in use, the types of passwords participants created, the relationships between different passwords and to sensitive services, how participants retrieved their passwords and finally, the different strategies adopted by users in their management of passwords. The paper concludes by providing a high level set of password guidelines, along with suggestions for mechanisms to support creating, encoding, retrieving and executing multiple passwords.     

TAPAS: A tangible End-User Development tool supporting the repurposing of Pervasive Displays

These days we are witnessing a spread of many new digital systems in public spaces featuring easy to use and engaging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, gestures, tangible, and voice. This new user-centered paradigm — known as the NUI — aims to provide a more natural and rich experience to end users; this supports its adoption in many ubiquitous domains, as it naturally holds for Pervasive Displays: these systems are composed of variously-sized displays and support many-to-many interactions with the same public screens at the same time. Due to their public and moderated nature, users need an easy way of adapting them to heterogeneous usage contexts in order to support their long-term adoption. In this paper, we propose an End-User Development approach to this problem introducing TAPAS, a system that combines a tangible interaction with a puzzle metaphor, allowing users to create workflows on a Pervasive Display to satisfy their needs; its design and visual syntax stem from a study we carried out with designers, whose findings are also part of this work. We then carried out a preliminary evaluation of our system with second year university students and interaction designers, gathering useful feedback to improve TAPAS and employ it in many other domains.     

Applying event related potentials to evaluate user preferences toward smartphone form design

Product forms can affect user preference and play an important role in user's purchasing decisions. Neuroimaging methods can provide an improved understanding of the mechanisms of decision making, which enhance the ability of enterprises to effectively design their products. Hence event related potentials (ERPs) were applied to explore the brain activity evoked by variety of product forms when users made preference among them. Smartphone product forms were displayed with equiprobability randomly. Participants were asked to click the left mouse button when they preferred one product form, else the right button for nonpreferred. The brain signals of each participant were recorded by Curry 7.0. Finally, brain signals were processed by using Curry 7.0 SBA and SPSS 18.0 software. The results showed that preferred product forms evoked enhanced N2, P2 and P3. Moreover, there were significant correlation between ERPs and behavioural data, participants devoted more attention and had faster responding time to preferred products than to nonpreferred. These results indicate that the differences of ERPs can be used to evaluate user preference.Relevance to industryThe integration of customer preferences is nowadays a challenge in new product development. Hence a thorough research on the inherent mechanism of preference formation can provide an accurate measurement method of user's perception. The differences of brain signals evoked by product forms can also provide technical support for product designers, which in turn can meet with user experience. Moreover, the results can be taken as evaluating indicators of product design.     

Investigating the added value of interactivity and serious gaming for educational TV

TV is a medium with high penetration rates and has been suited to deliver informal education in several aspects since years. Thus, interactive TV may play a significant role in the current Life-Long Learning challenges, provided that meaningful applications are implemented. In this research work, we have explored the added value of interactivity in digital TV, with a particular focus on Serious Games (SGs), given their growing relevance in technology-enhanced learning. We have followed an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach, in particular given the still traditional use of TV by a large audience. The approach preserves a media-driven strategy and the role of the author/director in proposing contents (storytelling), as in the TV tradition. We argue that interactive SGs may help the viewer to better contextualize/understand the video stream and go more in depth about the touched items at the end of the stream. This also enables new iTV applications, in particular to support weaker users (i.e. users that could not view the video without a help). This paper presents the results from user tests based on an interactive enhancement of a clip from the Disney’s Snow White movie, that challenged the authors in addressing a dynamic, high-value document. Qualitative and quantitative results show the potential of the system for informal education. The tests also stress the importance of good solutions (e.g., development languages, display modalities, metaphors) for synchronizing video and overlaid interactive elements. To the best of our knowledge, this research work is the first one discussing user test results about the usefulness of a class of iTV SG applications that can be instantiated serially in several different contexts.