User Satisfaction with Personalised Internet Applications

The study focuses on user satisfaction with websites and personalised internet applications in particular. The abundance of information on the web is increasing more and more. Therefore, the significance of websites targeting the users’ preferences, like personalised Internet applications, is rising. The aim of this study was to find out which factors determine user satisfaction with personalised internet applications. Factors like the usefulness of the information or trust towards how personal information is handled were considered. A large-scale user survey evaluating three internet applications (from the travel, e-learning and real estate domains) was conducted. Expert opinions were collected to complement the results and provide insights from users’ and experts’ points of views

User Satisfaction with Personalised Internet Applications

The study focuses on user satisfaction with websites and personalised internet applications in particular. The abundance of information on the web is increasing more and more. Therefore, the significance of websites targeting the users’ preferences, like personalised Internet applications, is rising. The aim of this study was to find out which factors determine user satisfaction with personalised internet applications. Factors like the usefulness of the information or trust towards how personal information is handled were considered. A large-scale user survey evaluating three internet applications (from the travel, e-learning and real estate domains) was conducted. Expert opinions were collected to complement the results and provide insights from users’ and experts’ points of views

Understanding the customer experience for service design

Tese de mestrado. Engenharia de Serviços e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

DEVELOPMENT OF A DESIGN METHOD TO REDUCE CHANGE PROPAGATION EFFECTS

ABSTRACT This dissertation presents a design method to reduce engineering changes caused due to change propagation effect. The method helps designers to systematically plan a verification, validation, and test (VV&T) plan. The rationale behind such a method is founded on a well-accepted principle that a robust validation plan can reduce design changes. However, such method has not yet been developed in mechanical engineering domain, so a method from software engineering has been adopted and extended to address the limitations in the existing design evaluation tools. Tools extensively used in industry, such as FMEA, and in academia have been reviewed to determine if they can identify different propagation pathways including variant, behavior, organization, and geometric pathways. As a result, it is found that variant and organizational pathways are not identified in any of these tools -- propagation in these pathways have caused major product failure in commercial vehicle and automatic fire sprinkler manufacturing industries. A seven-step VV&T method is proposed to address the aforementioned gap in which each step is tailored to suit mechanical engineering needs. The major contribution is developing the construct to identify variant and organization pathways and a prescriptive method. It has been validated in a leading commercial vehicle manufacturer, one of the passenger car manufacturing giants, and an automatic fire sprinkler manufacturer. The results from these three companies indicate the proposed VV&T method enables designers to identify variant and organizational pathways and evaluate them, which in turn can reduce design changes due to propagation effects. Objective evidence obtained from the fire sprinkler manufacturing company supports this claim. \u27If we know what assembly combination to test with, testing is not a problem...and if it can prevent a failure of this magnitude --I think this method can --it can be extremely beneficial...\u27 - Project engineer, commercial vehicle manufacture

The Development of Chatbot Provided Registration Information Services for Students in Distance Learning

In recent years, chatbots have become crucial, particularly for assisting students with real-time registration information. This research focused on 1) synthesizing registry works related to information provided for students, 2) designing chatbots and conversation structures in the form of interactive conversations between students and robots for answering questions and providing information tailored to their needs, and 3) examining and evaluating the use of chatbots in providing information services to students, while analyzing the accuracy and suitability of the developed chatbot. This study, based on research and development, utilized a sample consisting of 16 staff directly involved in the provision of registration information to students and 255 undergraduate students from Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, with respondents being selected through a simple random sampling technique. The synthesis of the research results revealed the following findings: 1) A qualitative study revealed that the registration information related to students, called STOU Journey, consisted of 10 issues, and was required for the whole learning period. 2) The result of the design and development of the chatbot revealed that the developer chatbot could be used on both the website and the LINE application. It was also found that the chatbot could answer most questions correctly and completely. The chatbot responded quickly and was easy to use. The chatbot used language that was easy to understand and natural, while 3) satisfactory evaluation results from 255 undergraduate students showed that overall, students who had used the completed version of the chatbot were satisfied with the use of the chatbot at a high level (Mean = 4.19, SD = 0.98) while they also felt that the chatbot was easy to use (Mean = 4.33, SD = 0.95) and the using the chatbot felt like a natural conversation (Mean = 4.22, SD = 0.99)

Design for Producibility in Fabricated Aerospace Components - A framework for predicting and controlling geometrical variation and weld quality defects during multidisciplinary design

In the aerospace industry, weight reduction has been one of the key factors in making aircraft more fuel efficient in order to satisfy environmental demands and increase competitiveness. One strategy adopted by aircraft component suppliers to reduce weight has been fabrication, in which small cast or forged parts are welded together into a final shape. Fabrication increases design freedom due to the possibility of configuring several materials and geometries, which broadens out the design space and allows multioptimization in product weight, performance quality and cost. However, with fabrication, the number of assembly steps and the complexity of the manufacturing process have increased. The use of welding has brought to the forefront important producibility problems related to geometrical variation and weld quality.The goal of this research is to analyze the current situation in industry and academia and propose methods and tools within Engineering Design and Quality Engineering to solve producibility problems involving welded high performance integrated components. The research group “Geometry Assurance and Robust Design” at Chalmers University of Technology, in which this thesis has been produced, has the objective to simulate and foresee geometrical quality problems during the early phases of the product realization process to allow the development of robust concepts and the optimization of tolerances, thus solving producibility problems. Virtual manufacturing is a key within the multidisciplinary design process of aerospace components, in which automated processes analyze broad sets of design variants to trade-off requirements among various disciplines. However, as studied in this thesis, existing methods and tools to analyze producibility do not cover all aspects that define the quality of welded structures. Furthermore, to this day, not all phenomena related to welding can be virtually modelled. Understanding causes and effects still relies on expert judgements and physical experimentation to a great deal. However, when it comes to assessing the capability of many geometrical variants, such an effort might be costly. This deficiency indicates the need for virtual assessment methods and systematic experimentation to analyze the producibility of the design variants and produce process capability data that can be reused in future projects.To fulfill that need, this thesis provides support to designers in assessing producibility by virtually and rapidly predicting the welding quality of a large number of product design variants during the multidisciplinary design space process of fabricated aerospace components.The first step has been to map the fabrication process during which producibility problems might potentially occur. The producibility conceptual model has been proposed to represent the fabrication process in order to understand how variation is originated and propagated. With this representation at hand, a number of methods have been developed and employed to provide support to: 1) Identify and 2) Measure what affects producibility; 3) Analyze the effect of the interaction between factors that affect producibility and 4)Predict producibility. These activities and methods constitute the core of the proposed Design for Producibility framework. This framework combines specialized information about welding problems (know-hows), and inspection, testing and simulation data to systematically predict and evaluate the welding producibility of a set of product design variants. Through this thesis, producibility evaluations are no longer limited to a single geometry and the study of the process parameter window. Instead, a set of geometrical variants within the design space can be analyzed. The results can be used to perform optimization and evaluate trade-offs among different disciplines during design space exploration and analysis, thus supporting the multidisciplinary design process of fabricated (welded) aerospace components