Product features and task effects on experienced richness, control and engagement in voicemail browsing

A recent focus is on creating engaging user experiences with digital products and services such as voicemail. This study aims to design towards increased levels of engagement in voicemail browsing by using the ‘Richness, Control and Engagement’ (RC & E) framework. This framework explains the levels of engagement in terms of the levels of richness and control that are shaped by the features of a product and the user’s expertise. A product was developed that utilized gestures and sound to access digital voicemail contents. An experiment was conducted in which 28 participants interacted with the product while varying (1) the number of features of the user interface, (2) the amount of voicemail content and (3) the type of task. Results showed that the levels of engagement could be predicted according to the levels of richness and control experienced when a task-term was added to the framework. Implications of the refined RC & E framework for interaction design practice are discussed.     

Shareability-Exclusivity Representation on Product Grassmann Manifolds for Multi-camera video clustering

With the rapid popularity of multi-camera networks, one human action is usually captured by multiple cameras located at different angles simultaneously. Multi-camera videos contain the distinct perspectives of one action, therefore multiple views can overcome the impacts of illumination and occlusion. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-camera video clustering model, named Shareability-Exclusivity Representation on Product Grassmann Manifolds (PGM-SER), to address two key issues in traditional multi-view clustering methods (MVC): (1) Most MVC methods directly construct a shared similarity matrix by fusing multi-view data or their corresponding similarity matrices, which ignores the exclusive information in each view; (2) Most MVC methods are designed for multi-view vectorial data, which cannot handle the nonlinear manifold structure hidden in multi-camera videos. The proposed PGM-SER firstly adopts Product Grassmann Manifolds to represent multi-camera videos, then simultaneously learn their shared and exclusive information in global structures to achieve multi-camera video clustering. We provide an effective optimization algorithm to solve PGM-SER and present the corresponding convergence analysis. Finally, PGM-SER is tested on three multi-camera human action video datasets and obtain satisfied experimental results.     

产品细节形态设计探究

目的探究产品细节形态设计中的设计原则和方法。方法结合现有产品的调研汇总、基本模型的建立分析以及问卷调查的结果,对影响产品外观细节形态的两个基本要素——圆角和分割线的属性对产品视觉美感的影响进行研究,并给出相关实例验证。结论分析了产品细节形态中圆角和分割线两个视觉元素对产品视觉感受的影响,提出了在产品细节形态设计中合理设计圆角和分割线的原则和方法,给出了从圆角和分割线两个方面提升整体产品视觉美感的优化方案。     

The Design with Intent Method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour

Using product and system design to influence user behaviour offers potential for improving performance and reducing user error, yet little guidance is available at the concept generation stage for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour. This article presents the Design with Intent Method, an innovation tool for designers working in this area, illustrated via application to an everyday human-technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine. The example application results in a range of feasible design concepts which are comparable to existing developments in ATM design, demonstrating that the method has potential for development and application as part of a user-centred design process.     

Shifts in sensory dominance between various stages of user-product interactions

In the area of product design, sensory dominance can be defined as the relative importance of different sensory modalities for product experience. It is often assumed that vision dominates the other senses. In the present study, we asked 243 participants to describe their experiences with consumer products in various situations: while buying a product, after the first week, the first month, and the first year of usage. The data suggest that the dominant sensory modality depends on the period of product usage. At the moment of buying, vision is the most important modality, but during the usage the other sensory modalities gain importance. The roles of the different modalities during usage are product-dependent. Averaged over 93 products analyzed in this study, after one month of usage touch becomes more important than vision, and after one year vision, touch and audition appear to be equally important. We conclude that to create a long-lasting positive product experience, designers need to consider user-product interaction at different stages of product usage and to determine which sensory modality dominates product experience at each stage.     

RFID轻量型中间件的构成与实现

为满足国内中小企业的实际管理需求,设计一种射频识别(RFID)轻量型中间件,其架构介于以基础架构为中心与以应用程序为中心的中间件之间,简化了电子产品代码(EPC)系统的应用层事件结构。以应用程序接口为基础,借鉴数据库集成过滤思想实现的轻量型中间件,具有结构简单、开发周期短、易于后期维护和扩展的特点。     

Labeling design documents based on operators’ consensus—A case study of robotic design

Designers usually begin with a database to look for historical design solution, available experience and techniques through design documents, when initiating a new design. This database is a collection of labeled design documents under a few of predefined categories. However, little work has been done on labeling a relatively small number of design documents for information organization, so that most of design documents in this database can be automatically categorized.This paper initiates a study on this topic and proposes a methodology in four steps: design document collection, documents labeling, finalization of documents labeling and categorization of design database. Our discussion in this paper focuses on the first three steps. The key of this method is to collect relatively small number of design documents for manual labeling operation, and unify the effective labeling results as the final labels in terms of labeling agreement analysis and text classification experiment. Then these labeled documents are utilized as training samples to construct classifiers, which can automatically give appropriate labels to each design document.With this method, design documents are labeled in terms of the consensus of operators’ understanding, and design information can be organized in a comprehensive and universally accessible way. A case study of labeling robotic design documents is used to demonstrate the proposed methodology. Experimental results show that this method can significantly benefit efficient design information search.     

Inventory model for seasonal demand with option to change the market

In real life, when bulk purchase becomes convenient or even mandatory, it is a common practice for distributors to explore an alternative market in order to maximize the revenue earned. In this paper, we consider an inventory model for a product having seasonal demand with two potential markets, say, primary and alternate. The distributor has a single opportunity of procurement prior to multiple demand seasons in the primary and the alternate market. Both the markets have similar demand patterns, with time lag between their demand seasons. The demand is a price and time dependent function with increasing, constant and declining phases within each demand season. The scale parameter of demand rate depends upon the market. In each market, successive seasons are separated by random time. In one replenishment cycle, the distributor has a single option to exit the primary market by transferring the inventory, with or without change in selling price. This option can be exercised at the end of any complete season at the primary market. Our investigations indicate that it will be beneficial for the distributor to shift to the alternate market even at a slightly lower selling price if demand rate in the alternate market is higher. Optimal number of seasons at the primary market before change of price or market is obtained. Optimal policy is obtained for jointly determining the order quantity and price. Concavity of the profit function is discussed. Solution procedure, numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are presented.     

Building a database for product design knowledge retrieval—A case study in robotic design database

In product design process, when dealing with technical problems or initiating a new design, R&D personnel would often turn to technical database to seek inspiration. The building of a database with such documents has not been systematically dealt with. In this paper, several issues on how to build up a product design database are investigated: input source, sampling scheme and quality control. A case study of building a database for robotic design is used to demonstrate the concept. It is an archive of more than 1500 relevant technical papers. A total of 16 graduates are employed as operators in the labeling process and subsequently the hypothesis tests are utilized to process the labeling results. To ensure this database quality, the labeling consistency of each operator and the understanding of each category are tested. With the use of statistical methods, this work proposes a feasible and practical way to create such a database for product design.     

Consumer perceptions on web advertisements and motivation factors to purchase in the online shopping

The principal objective of this study was to investigate the mediating and moderating effects of product involvement and trust toward websites in relation to the effects of the attributes of web advertisements on customers’ purchase intentions. We collected data consisting of a total of 264 responses from individuals with previous experience with purchasing products from online shopping mall sites, and utilized the PLS (partial least squares) method to analyze the collected data.