A Study of Designer Familiarity with Product and User During Requirement Elicitation

It is important to recognise the effects of a designer\u27s source of information and decision making during requirements elicitation. Requirements are widely recognised as an important step in the design process. Designers may have perspective based on their experience which results in a level of familiarity with the design. This paper reports on a study that explores the effects of designer familiarity with a project and its user on their ability to elicit requirement specifications. Two familiarity constructs, product and user, are measured as low or high and used to study requirement elicitation with varying familiarity. A high familiarity study using five graduate students and a low familiarity study using a team of five students during senior capstone design are compared for their requirements elicitation. The results of this study include an analysis of the requirements developed and participant survey results from the elicitation process. The results revealed familiarity does in fact have an effect on the ability of elicit requirements. Participants in the low familiarity study expressed difficulty and eliciting requirements while those in the high familiarity study were able to generate more requirements at a faster rate

Evaluating online customer data helpfulness to set targets: a QFD perspective

Retrieving knowledge and useful information from customers is crucial to develop customer-focused products and maintain the market share. With the rapid growth of the Internet, the ability of users to create and publish content has generated a wealth of product information from customers’ point of view. Given the abundance of large scale, publicly available data social media can enable novel social ways of providing and receiving feedback from new products and concepts. In order to avoid information overload, identifying and analyzing helpful reviews has become a critical challenge. Identifying helpful online reviews and learning how to extract valuable data from product design perspective has become a crucial task due to the existing information overload –identifying what is relevant to analyze is a key task for companies. Existing studies have focused on identifying variables that affect the perceived helpfulness of an online comment. To the best author’s knowledge, actual studies about helpfulness do not consider the Quality Function Deployment perspective on evaluating to what extend the customer data from social media is helpful to set objective targets. The thesis aims to evaluate social media data helpfulness from the designer’s perspective taking as basis QFD. Evaluating this, the work hypothesis is that the helpfulness definition has to move beyond, taking into consideration what is needed to build The House of Quality, a key tool in product design. To do so, an exploratory analysis of real public data from Twitter, Facebook and iMore forum is taken as basis. The purpose of undertaking exploratory research is primarily to investigate and to identify if the proposed variables for defining review’s helpfulness currently existing in the literature review can help designers in target setting within a QFD perspective The presented thesis shows that to go further within target setting is needed to have the QFD perspective: not all current exposed variables do not help to explain online reviews helpfulness.Outgoin

Evaluating online customer data helpfulness to set targets: a QFD perspective

Retrieving knowledge and useful information from customers is crucial to develop customer-focused products and maintain the market share. With the rapid growth of the Internet, the ability of users to create and publish content has generated a wealth of product information from customers’ point of view. Given the abundance of large scale, publicly available data social media can enable novel social ways of providing and receiving feedback from new products and concepts. In order to avoid information overload, identifying and analyzing helpful reviews has become a critical challenge. Identifying helpful online reviews and learning how to extract valuable data from product design perspective has become a crucial task due to the existing information overload –identifying what is relevant to analyze is a key task for companies. Existing studies have focused on identifying variables that affect the perceived helpfulness of an online comment. To the best author’s knowledge, actual studies about helpfulness do not consider the Quality Function Deployment perspective on evaluating to what extend the customer data from social media is helpful to set objective targets. The thesis aims to evaluate social media data helpfulness from the designer’s perspective taking as basis QFD. Evaluating this, the work hypothesis is that the helpfulness definition has to move beyond, taking into consideration what is needed to build The House of Quality, a key tool in product design. To do so, an exploratory analysis of real public data from Twitter, Facebook and iMore forum is taken as basis. The purpose of undertaking exploratory research is primarily to investigate and to identify if the proposed variables for defining review’s helpfulness currently existing in the literature review can help designers in target setting within a QFD perspective The presented thesis shows that to go further within target setting is needed to have the QFD perspective: not all current exposed variables do not help to explain online reviews helpfulness.Outgoin

Elusive intangibles : Exploring the experience of authenticity in product development

When consumers buy a new product, they have expectations about what that product will deliver. The consumer’s rational reasoning may try to ascertain whether the technical performance of the product will be fulfilled. Nevertheless, the final word is often subjective. Does it feel right? Is the product attractive, is it worth paying that much for? It is well established that human perception is highly subjective and elusive in nature. Although reason might tell us to go for the “sensible” choice, if the product is not experienced as attractive or exciting enough, the choice might go to something else or lead to dissatisfaction with the chosen product. This is why intangible experiences are important to consider when developing highly valued consumer products.The research in this thesis represents a journey. Along its path, it has been studied how one might understand, elicit and capture intangible product value. How are intangibles relevant to industry, and how might they support product development in the quest for developing products that are highly valued on the market? The initial research, when this thesis began, was concerned with a new way to elicit, capture and assess this type of value. The value of this research lies in the development and validation of a new type of internet tool for the elicitation and assessment of product intangibles that are intended to capture consumer response in a different way from traditional internet tools for product assessment. The latter and greater part of this research has attempted to describe what intangibles are, how professionals talk about them, and what significance they have for product value and product development. What type of value are product developers trying to integrate into the products they develop, and how do they reason? This research has particularly focused on describing and understanding the intangible quality of product and brand authenticity. One contribution of this thesis is its review of how authenticity is described by literature in the fields of product development, branding and marketing management. Thus, it describes the ongoing debate on authenticity as a leading determinant of market value. However, it remains unclear what saying that a product or a brand is authentic means within product development. This has been analysed in this thesis. The thesis also gives an account of what qualities different professions within product development and industrial design have found to be important when developing highly valued consumer products. This thesis also makes a contribution by proposing a new, multidimensional construct for authenticity that explains how market value relates to authenticity. This multidimensional construct of authenticity is a framework that explains how different fields related to product development may be used for companies in creating and maintaining product offerings with a high market value

Assessing the impact of physicians' social capital on decision making quality mediated by knowledge sharing in a virtual community of practice: an empirical quantitative analysis

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London.Purpose - Healthcare (HC) is a globally expensive investment, suffering from service quality, due to medical errors caused by physicians’ poor decisions making (DM). Current published literature: (1) encourages clinical DM research to reduce diagnostic errors and (2) stresses on the dearth of means for practitioners’ knowledge shared DM; this research focuses on knowledge sharing for improving medical DM quality through physicians’ social capital (SC) in a virtual community of practice (VCoP). Physicians join a virtual community (VC) to share clinical practice knowledge to aid medical DM. This study aims to assess the effect of physicians’ SC on medical DM and assess the mediating role of knowledge sharing quality, between physicians’ SC and medical DM quality since research lacks to investigate the impact of knowledge management (KM) tools in a HC context. VCoP is a KM tool and medical DM quality is a HC topic of this study. Design/methodology/approach – This positivist, quantitative research utilizes non-experimental survey to empirically assess its conceptual framework. After attaining an ethical approval, from Brunel Business School Research Ethics Committee, online survey was pre-tested and pilot tested for clarity and validity. 10 non-physician Ph.D. academics voluntarily participated during the survey’s pre-test phase. The survey was amendment for its pilot study phase; conducted in “plastic surgery yahoo group” VC. 31 physician VC members voluntarily participated. Again, the survey was amended and distributed for main data collection from 204 voluntary SurveyMonkey’s VC’s physician members. Findings – Data was analysed using SPSS 20 and LISREL 8.80 by means of confirmatory factor analysis and Structural Equation Modeling. Empirical findings supported this study’s four main hypotheses as well as supported this study’s initially proposed conceptual framework. Originality/value – This study customized the Honeycomb framework to establish a definition of professional physicians; HC VCs followed by identifying 51 VCs from social networking platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. This study also fulfilled its aim and hence proposed a structurally fit conceptual framework. Keywords –Virtual Community of Practice; Healthcare Knowledge Management; Confirmatory Factor Analysis; Structural Equation Modelin

An ebd-enabled design knowledge acquisition framework

Having enough knowledge and keeping it up to date enables designers to execute the design assignment effectively and gives them a competitive advantage in the design profession. Knowledge elicitation or acquisition is a crucial component of system design, particularly for tasks requiring transdisciplinary or multidisciplinary cooperation. In system design, extracting domain-specific information is exceedingly tricky for designers. This thesis presents three works that attempt to bridge the gap between designers and domain expertise. First, a systematic literature review on data-driven demand elicitation is given using the Environment-based Design (EBD) approach. This review address two research objectives: (i) to investigate the present state of computer-aided requirement knowledge elicitation in the domains of engineering; (ii) to integrate EBD methodology into the conventional literature review framework by providing a well-structured research question generation methodology. The second study describes a data-driven interview transcript analysis strategy that employs EBD environment analysis, unsupervised machine learning, and a range of natural language processing (NLP) approaches to assist designers and qualitative researchers in extracting needs when domain expertise is lacking. The second research proposes a transfer-learning method-based qualitative text analysis framework that aids researchers in extracting valuable knowledge from interview data for healthcare promotion decision-making. The third work is an EBD-enabled design lexical knowledge acquisition framework that automatically constructs a semantic network -- RomNet from an extensive collection of abstracts from engineering publications. Applying RomNet can improve the design information retrieval quality and communication between each party involved in a design project. To conclude, this thesis integrates artificial intelligence techniques, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, Machine Learning techniques, and rule-based systems to build a knowledge acquisition framework that supports manual, semi-automatic, and automatic extraction of design knowledge from different types of the textual data source