Applying user-experience design to support Johannesburg high school educators teaching design thinking

Abstract: This research paper describes and reflects on the effectiveness of integrating Research through Design as both a methodology and Design Thinking in order to co-design a digital product with and for high school educators. In reference to this concern, the aim of this study is to explore how digital technology can be designed by applying User-experience Design (UXD) to support the teaching activities of educators teaching DT, so that they may become more confident and knowledgeable facilitators. The end result of this process was for an interactive digital platform aimed at introducing DT to SA teachers of art, design and technology. A Research through Design methodology is applied in this study within the specific contexts of a co-design project involving high school teachers in Johannesburg, South Africa. The study undertakes a human-centred design philosophy whereby users’ problems and experiences are seen as contextual and complex, therefore requiring that the researcher to have consideration and understanding before these problems can be resolved. The design process applied in this study therefore focused on gaining an understanding of the teachers’ experiences in order to design effective and empathetic technological solutions that will be meaningful and useful to the teachers...M.A. (Multimedia

A cooperative design approach to the design of interactive devices for small, specialized user groups

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.This research considers a cooperative design approach to the design, development and implementation of interactive devices catering to small, specialised user groups. Conventional methods of mass production used in the manufacture of interactive devices demand medium to large volume production runs of 10,000 to 100,000 + units for products to remain cost effective. This drives the need for products to appeal to large user groups, which means product implementation catering to small user groups is limited. However there is a need for interactive devices catering to small user groups in industries that require specialised devices to do specific tasks. Such industries include mining, health care and aged care to name a few. Recent advancements in Additive Manufacturing technology combined with the availability of Open Source Hardware + Software offer the possibility to develop and implement interactive devices for low-volume production starting as low as one unit produced. Conventional User Centred Design approaches used in Industrial Design are tailored towards high-volume production, however for small-volume production a cooperative design (co-design) approach may be more relevant. To investigate this a study was conducted by devising a co-design approach and applying it to the design, development and implementation of an Operator Control Unit (OCU). This OCU was designed to control a semi-autonomous robotic Grit-blasting Assistive Device (GAD) that was deployed on the Sydney Harbour Bridge (SHB). The purpose of the SHB GAD is to remove old paint and rust from the Harbour Bridge steel structure by blasting it with grit. The development of the SHB GAD, including its OCU, is a joint project between Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) and the University of Technology Sydney’s Centre for Autonomous Systems. The project was chosen for the study because the SHB GAD is a tool developed specifically for the Sydney Harbour Bridge and is to be used by a small user group of ten users. The study was conducted by designing and developing the OCU cooperatively with five users, who are employees of RMS. Upon implementation of the OCU resulting from the study, a review of the co-design approach was conducted, by interviewing the five users and asking them to reflect on the process. The results revealed that this research is able to make contributions that will assist in furthering knowledge in this area. Furthermore the results led to a set of conclusions, of which one is that a co-design approach adds value to a project at a personal, team and company level. The resulting OCU was also compared to two commercially available OCUs. This comparison demonstrated, that the resulting OCU could be identified as a robotic OCU even though the users involved in the co-design approach had no previous design or robotics experience. The contributions and conclusions may provide new ways of structuring Industrial Design and Human Robot Interaction approaches to the design of interactive devices for small, specialised user groups

Living Innovation Laboratory Model Design and Implementation

Living Innovation Laboratory (LIL) is an open and recyclable way for multidisciplinary researchers to remote control resources and co-develop user centered projects. In the past few years, there were several papers about LIL published and trying to discuss and define the model and architecture of LIL. People all acknowledge about the three characteristics of LIL: user centered, co-creation, and context aware, which make it distinguished from test platform and other innovation approaches. Its existing model consists of five phases: initialization, preparation, formation, development, and evaluation. Goal Net is a goal-oriented methodology to formularize a progress. In this thesis, Goal Net is adopted to subtract a detailed and systemic methodology for LIL. LIL Goal Net Model breaks the five phases of LIL into more detailed steps. Big data, crowd sourcing, crowd funding and crowd testing take place in suitable steps to realize UUI, MCC and PCA throughout the innovation process in LIL 2.0. It would become a guideline for any company or organization to develop a project in the form of an LIL 2.0 project. To prove the feasibility of LIL Goal Net Model, it was applied to two real cases. One project is a Kinect game and the other one is an Internet product. They were both transformed to LIL 2.0 successfully, based on LIL goal net based methodology. The two projects were evaluated by phenomenography, which was a qualitative research method to study human experiences and their relations in hope of finding the better way to improve human experiences. Through phenomenographic study, the positive evaluation results showed that the new generation of LIL had more advantages in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.Comment: This is a book draf

Identifying Agile Requirements Engineering Patterns in Industry

Agile Software Development (ASD) is gaining in popularity in today´s business world. Industry is adopting agile methodologies both to accelerate value delivery and to enhance the ability to deal with changing requirements. However, ASD has a great impact on how Requirements Engineering (RE) is carried out in agile environments. The integration of Human-Centered Design (HCD) plays an important role due to the focus on user and stakeholder involvement. To this end, we aim to introduce agile RE patterns as main objective of this paper. On the one hand, we will describe our pattern mining process based on empirical research in literature and industry. On the other hand, we will discuss our results and provide two examples of agile RE patterns. In sum, the pattern mining process identifies 41 agile RE patterns. The accumulated knowledge will be shared by means of a web application.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Getting it Right: Lessons Learned in Applying a Critical Artefact Approach

“Critical artefacts”, the products of critical design (Dunne 1999), prompt reflection rather than satisfy obvious user needs. The author is developing an instrumental use of critical artefacts as part of a human-centred design process. Earlier work showed the effectiveness of this approach in allowing stakeholders to engage with novel product ideas. This paper describes a project, Living Rooms, developing the approach with a broader group of stakeholders and devising the critical artefacts with other designers. Although providing insights into the design context (Bowen & Chamberlain 2008), this application of the approach was less productive than in earlier projects and suggested factors that could affect its efficacy. Implications for future applications of the approach are noted: the type of contexts it is appropriate for; the characteristics of effective stakeholder participants and the need to educate them in the context and enable them to think imaginatively. Von Hippel’s ‘lead users’ (1986, 1988) could provide a framework for selecting stakeholders likely to engage effectively with critical artefacts. The second part of the paper summarises lead user theory and discusses how the two characteristics of lead users, motivation and capability (Luthje & Herstatt 2004), tend to make them suitable participants for the critical artefact approach. A second project, Digital Mementos, is described – in particular how lead-user-based selection and the above implications have been applied. The paper concludes by reviewing the progress in developing generalisable methods exploiting the critical artefact approach, noting the need to position the approach within wider design activity and points toward future work relating it to the entire product design process. Keywords: Critical Design; Human-Centred Design; Innovation; Design Methodology</p

Anticipating user eXperience with a desired product: The AUX framework

Positive user experience (UX) has become a key factor in designing interactive products. It acts as a differentiator which can determine a product’s success on the mature market. However, current UX frameworks and methods do not fully support the early stages of product design and development. During these phases, assessment of UX is challenging as no actual user-product interaction can be tested. This qualitative study investigated anticipated user experience (AUX) to address this problem. Using the co-discovery method, participants were asked to imagine a desired product, anticipate experiences with it, and discuss their views with another participant. Fourteen sub-categories emerged from the data, and relationships among them were defined through co-occurrence analysis. These data formed the basis of the AUX framework which consists of two networks which elucidate 1) how users imagine a desired product and 2) how they anticipate positive experiences with that product. Through this AUX framework, important factors in the process of imagining future products and experiences were learnt, including the way in which these factors interrelate. Focusing on and exploring each component of the two networks in the framework will allow designers to obtain a deeper understanding of the required pragmatic and hedonic qualities of product, intended uses of product, user characteristics, potential contexts of experience, and anticipated emotions embedded within the experience. This understanding, in turn, will help designers to better foresee users’ underlying needs and to focus on the most important aspects of their positive experience. Therefore, the use of the AUX framework in the early stages of product development will contribute to the design for pleasurable UX

A method for identifying communication breakdowns in user-interfaces

Businesses are increasingly communicating with their customers via web-based interfaces. However, users are experiencing a lack of guidance and support in the communication of these often complex services. This paper proposes a method for identifying where and why there is a breakdown in communication between the interface and the user. In creating the method, the importance and value of having such a method are considered and discussed, particularly for communication rich interfaces. The method is developed based on the results from user trials with a mortgage application interface using the existing evaluation method. Although the results from piloting the method suggest that it is useful for identifying communication breakdowns within the user-interfaces, more work is required before a definitive method can be produced. As a result of this study it appears that communication breakdowns are related either to the information within an interface or to the process

Measuring Process Modelling Success

Process-modelling has seen widespread acceptance, par ticularly on large IT-enabled Business Process Reengineering projects. It is applied, as a process design and management technique, across all life-cycle phases of a system. While there has been much research on aspects of process-modelling, little attention has focused on post-hoc evaluation of process-modelling success. This paper addresses this gap, and presents a process-modelling success measurement (PMS) framework, which includes the dimensions: process-model quality; model use; user satisfaction; and process modelling impact. Measurement items for each dimension are also suggested

About the nature of Kansei information

Kansei studies refer to the more and more holistic consideration of the cognitive and affective processes which occur during user experience. In addition, few studies deal with the experience of the designers during the design process, and its influence on the final design outputs. Historically kansei engineering has been firstly focused on the semantic differential approach. Afterwards emotions were integrated into kansei approaches. The semantic differential approach enabled to evaluate products and then to generate automatically design solutions with semantic input data. Thereafter, evaluations have been completed by physiological measurements in order to reduce the subjectivity involved in those evaluations and also to capture some unconscious reactions. This implementation is still in process. Today kansei studies have been much enriched from the three disciplines of design science, psychology and artificial intelligence. The cross influence between these disciplines brought new dimensions into kansei approaches (multisensory design information, personality, values, and culture, new formalisms and algorithms) which lead progressively towards the consideration of a whole enriched kansei experience. We propose in this paper a description of the nature of kansei information. Then we present some major orientations for kansei evaluation. Finally we propose an overall table gathering information about kansei dimensions and formats.AN