Daniela Barattin

Generation, Adoption, and Tuning of Usability Evaluation Multimethods

The selection and customization of usability evaluation methods, given the peculiarities of their application domains, still remains a critical issue; this especially when dealing with complex products and/or nonexpert usability evaluators. Moreover, as time goes by, the quality of the evaluation results has a heavier impact on the product design process. Starting from classic usability evaluation methods, the research described in this article generates multimethods semiautomatically. It allows quantitative characterization of these multimethods before their application in the field and exploits the comparison between this prior assessment and a final estimate, made after adoption, to update the information used by the method selection process. The most critical issue related to usability, subjectivity, is considered and dealt with throughout the entire research. A case study, done at the end of the development phase, helps validate the proposed approach to usability evaluation.

Human in the loop: a model to integrate interaction issues in complex simulations

Several activities of the product development process as for example ergonomic analyses, usability testing, and what is defined as User Experience - UX- design in general require humans to be involved as testers. In order to achieve a good effectiveness degree, these tests must be performed on prototypes as much as possible similar to the final product, and this is costly and sometimes difficult to obtain during the development process. This is especially true at the earliest stages of the process. Functional mock-up - FMU - methods and tools can be of great help, because they allow technological aspects of the products, as electronics, hydraulics, mechanics, etc. to be represented and managed in a simple and effective way. Mathematical equations allow product behavior to be determined, due to input values representing the application environment of the product. At the moment, an FMU model is great in simulating product behavior from the technological point of view, but concerns about user interaction issues are left apart. The research described in this paper aims at widening the coverage of FMU to user-product interaction issues. The goal aims at evaluating the possibility of substituting real users with a characterization of them, and to model and simulate interaction in a homogeneous way together with all the other product aspects. All of this makes the research activities very challenging, and the result is a sort of FMU-assisted interaction modeling. As an evolution of what is generally recognized as hardware and software-in-the-loop, this methodology will be referred as human-in-the-loop.

Integrating Systematic Innovation, Interaction Design, Usability Evaluation and Trends of Evolution

Day by day, more RD it must be helped and exploited by a systematic approach. The research described in this paper aims at developing a design framework focused on interaction issues, by exploiting the systematic approach of the theory of inventing problem solving TRIZ. The final result should integrate design, evaluation, and evolution issues. For this reason, the starting point consists in three tools already developed by the authors’ research group: the interaction design guidelines—IDGL, the usability evaluation multi-methods—UEMM, and ITRE, a gatherer of interaction trends of evolution. All of them contain generic elements both of the TRIZ theory and the interaction design field; for this reason the proposed integrated approach could be exploited in completely different contexts. A first prototype of the framework has been developed as a Microsoft Access database. Its validation has started with two experiences in the field. Results are reported and discussed in the last section of the paper.

User Experience (UX) Evaluation Based on Interaction-Related Mental Models

In recent years, user experience (UX) has gained importance in product development because of the increased product complexity, the availability of innovative technologies, etc. UX evaluation methods and tools developed up to now keep users’ emotions in the right consideration; nevertheless, they do not exploit mental models at best. This research aims at developing a UX evaluation method based on the so-called interaction-related mental models, a specific type of mental models focused on interaction matters. The description of the method proposed here considers also its adoption in the field and the results are compared with those obtained by a classic usability evaluation method. Although the scope of the proposed method is quite limited now (the UX evaluation focuses on CAD software packages only), the research results seem very promising. Nevertheless, this limitation will be overcome in the near future.

An Augmented Reality Based Application for Furnishing Configuration and Evaluation

Virtual reality as the way to display digital models and to interact with them has flourished in industrial contexts some years ago, both for design and marketing reasons. However, some specific sectors, e.g. furnishings and garments, would prefer to evaluate their products in a real environment, where their models could be easily placed, and where the interaction with them could take place in a natural way. These requirements suggested the design of an application, based on the augmented reality, which allows users placing digital models of pieces of furniture in real domestic environments, verifying their dimensional and aesthetic compatibility with the existing context, and interacting with them to test functional behavior and usability issues. Such a project would result interesting both for possible customers and for designers, because some important design hints could come from its adoption. An application prototype has been developed and tested in the field in a couple of case studies.Copyright

Considering Users’ Different Knowledge About Products to Improve a UX Evaluation Method Based on Mental Models

User experience (UX) evaluation and design have become important components of the product development process. The UX describes the users’ subjective perceptions, responses and emotional reactions while interacting with products or services, considering users’ emotions and cognitive activities as the basic elements of the experience. The emotions encompass physiological, affective, behavioral, and cognitive components; the cognitive activities generate and exploit the mental models that govern the human behavior. The literature offers several methods to evaluate the UX; one of them, the irMMs-based method, considers both users’ emotions and mental models to evaluate the quality of the UX. Nevertheless, its current release misses the contribution of users who already know the product under evaluation. This research aims at improving the irMMs-based method by considering also users familiar with those products. The expected benefits of this improvement refer to the completeness of the evaluation results and to the definition of relationships between these results and the evaluation activities that allow them to be discovered. All of this can be useful for both researchers and designers who are willing to increase their knowledge about the generation and exploitation of mental models and to select the most suitable evaluation activities to perform time by time depending on the characteristics of the results they are interested in and on the resources available.

Involving Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affected people in design

This research aims at moving from design for disabled people to design led by disabled people. This is achieved by defining a roadmap suggesting how to involve people affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in design. These people could represent an added value given their uncommon reasoning mechanisms. The core of the roadmap consists of tests involving groups of ASD and neurotypical people. These tests are performed using shapes; the testers are asked for interacting with these shapes and highlighting aroused functions, meanings and emotions. The outcomes are analyzed in terms of variety, quality, frequency and originality, and elaborated in order to pursue unforeseen, innovative design solutions.

Definition and quantification of innovation in interaction

A method for determining which product is more innovative than others and for determining the degree of innovation could be useful. Furthermore, such determination could focus on human–machine interaction. Based on a set of trends of evolution in interaction and on existing methods for the definition and quantification of innovation and related concepts, this research defines and quantifies innovation in interaction. This approach can help designers select the most innovative solution concepts and can help marketing experts establish their selling strategies; in addition, final users can be aided when choosing the best product to buy. This paper describes the definition of new metrics that focus on interaction in conjunction with a computational pipeline that uses these metrics to assess the presence and degree of innovation in interaction. An early validation of the results in the field is reported as well.

Investigating Synergies Between Interaction Design Methods

A successful product provides a pleasurable and straightforward experience. This leads to an increasing importance of the human-computer interaction and user experience issues in design. Despite the wealth of methods and tools available to support the design process, these are frequently incomplete and difficult to use. This research contributes to fill this gap by investigating the possible synergies between two design methods, the BadIdeas method (BI) and the Interaction Design Integrated Method (IDIM). BI is an early design method especially suited for the ideation phase of the design process. IDIM deals with design, evaluation, and innovation forecasting, and covers the first part of the product development process. Two limitations are highlighted in each of these methods and their concepts and tools are mutually exploited to improve the other. Suggestions for integration and improvement are presented with examples that demonstrate the benefits of this research.

Analysis of Users and Designers’ Cognitive Processes in Interaction Design Activities

Over the years, the increasing importance of interaction issues has suggested involving final users in design teams. This involvement requires a careful reasoning in order to maximize the users’ contribution. The research described in this paper aims at this maximization based on considerations about cognitive processes. The situated FBS framework — an existing tool to describe designers’ reasoning — is exploited to analyze the users and designers’ cognitive processes while they are designing together. The quantification of the cognitive effort allows highlighting and managing peaks, possible further interactions and missing activities. The result is a revised release of the design process, with a redistribution of the effort, an enhancement of the user-designer dialogue and the introduction of a new activity.Copyright