General characteristics of anticipated user experience (AUX) with interactive products

Providing a positive user experience (UX) has become the key differentiator for products to win a competition in mature markets. To ensure that a product will support enjoyable experiences for its users, assessment of UX should be conducted early during the design and development process. However, most UX frameworks and evaluation techniques focus on understanding and assessing user’s experience with functional prototypes or existing products. This situation delays UX assessment until the late phases of product development which may result in costly design modifications and less desirable products. A qualitative study was conducted to investigate anticipated user experience (AUX) to address this issue. Twenty pairs of participants were asked to imagine an interactive product, draw their product concept, and anticipate their interactions and experiences with it. The data was analyzed to identify general characteristics of AUX. We found that while positive AUX was mostly related to an imagined/desired product, negative AUX was mainly associated with existing products. It was evident that the pragmatic quality of product was fundamental, and significantly influenced user’s anticipated experiences. Furthermore, the hedonic quality of product received more focus in positive than negative AUX. The results also showed that context, user profile, experiential knowledge, and anticipated emotion could be reflected in AUX. The understanding of AUX will help product designers to better foresee the users’ underlying needs and to focus on the most important aspects of their positive experiences, which in turn facilitates the designers to ensure pleasurable UX from the start of the design process

A prescriptive approach to qualify and quantify customer value for value-based requirements engineering

Recently, customer-based product development is becoming a popular paradigm. Customer expectations and needs can be identified and transformed into requirements for product design with the help of various methods and tools. However, in many cases, these models fail to focus on the perceived value that is crucial when customers make the decision of purchasing a product. In this paper, a prescriptive approach to support value-based requirements engineering (RE) is proposed, describing the foundations, procedures and initial applications in the context of RE for commercial aircraft. An integrated set of techniques, such as means-ends analysis, part-whole analysis and multi-attribute utility theory is introduced in order to understand customer values in depth and width. Technically, this enables identifying the implicit value, structuring logically collected statements of customer expectations and performing value modelling and simulation. Additionally, it helps to put in place a system to measure customer satisfaction that is derived from the proposed approach. The approach offers significant potential to develop effective value creation strategies for the development of new product

Transforming pedagogy using mobile Web 2.0

Blogs, wikis, podcasting, and a host of free, easy to use Web 2.0 social software provide opportunities for creating social constructivist learning environments focusing on student-centred learning and end-user content creation and sharing. Building on this foundation, mobile Web 2.0 has emerged as a viable teaching and learning tool, facilitating engaging learning environments that bridge multiple contexts. Today’s dual 3G and wifi-enabled smartphones provide a ubiquitous connection to mobile Web 2.0 social software and the ability to view, create, edit, upload, and share user generated Web 2.0 content. This article outlines how a Product Design course has moved from a traditional face-to-face, studio-based learning environment to one using mobile Web 2.0 technologies to enhance and engage students in a social constructivist learning paradigm. Keywords: m-learning; Web 2.0; pedagogy 2.0; social constructivism; product desig

Innovative strategies for 3D visualisation using photogrammetry and 3D scanning for mobile phones

3D model generation through Photogrammetry is a modern overlay of digital information representing real world objects in a virtual world. The immediate scope of this study aims at generating 3D models using imagery and overcoming the challenge of acquiring accurate 3D meshes. This research aims to achieve optimised ways to document raw 3D representations of real life objects and then converting them into retopologised, textured usable data through mobile phones. Augmented Reality (AR) is a projected combination of real and virtual objects. A lot of work is done to create market dependant AR applications so customers can view products before purchasing them. The need is to develop a product independent photogrammetry to AR pipeline which is freely available to create independent 3D Augmented models. Although for the particulars of this research paper, the aim would be to compare and analyse different open source SDK’s and libraries for developing optimised 3D Mesh using Photogrammetry/3D Scanning which will contribute as a main skeleton to the 3D-AR pipeline. Natural disasters, global political crisis, terrorist attacks and other catastrophes have led researchers worldwide to capture monuments using photogrammetry and laser scans. Some of these objects of “global importance” are processed by companies including CyArk (Cyber Archives) and UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre, who work against time to preserve these historical monuments, before they are damaged or in some cases completely destroyed. The need is to question the significance of preserving objects and monuments which might be of value locally to a city or town. What is done to preserve those objects? This research would develop pipelines for collecting and processing 3D data so the local communities could contribute towards restoring endangered sites and objects using their smartphones and making these objects available to be viewed in location based AR. There exist some companies which charge relatively large amounts of money for local scanning projects. This research would contribute as a non-profitable project which could be later used in school curriculums, visitor attractions and historical preservation organisations all over the globe at no cost. The scope isn’t limited to furniture, museums or marketing, but could be used for personal digital archiving as well. This research will capture and process virtual objects using Mobile Phones comparing methodologies used in Computer Vision design from data conversion on Mobile phones to 3D generation, texturing and retopologising. The outcomes of this research will be used as input for generating AR which is application independent of any industry or product