According to the user-centred design (UCD) philosophy, users should be involved as much as possible in the different stages of the design process, to optimize the likelihood that design proposals will be appreciated by users. In this paper, first we consider some challenges and questions that are raised by this general guideline. Next, we summarize outcomes of an ongoing project that addresses the question of when and how to involve the user in the design process. We report UCD opinions and practices in industry. In addition, we present work in progress aiming to develop tools and guidelines that should support design departments in industry to develop design proposals that optimize the fit-to-context. This includes a study investigating the effects of realism and animation of concept representations on user feedback. These studies help us to get a better understanding of when and how to involve users in the design process.
Product design is no longer solely driven by functionality. Usability and pleasure increasingly determine the success of a product. To address these emerging consumer needs, design literature offers various tools and methods for engaging end-users in the early phases of the design process. The study presented in this paper compares the state of the art in literature to design practice, represented by four different companies. During four separate studies the authors conducted extensive interviews throughout the companies to identify various user engagement methods, related challenges and pitfalls. The methods have been categorised according to the medium through which users provide information, namely what users say, what users do and what users make.The result of this categorisation shows that companies primarily involve users by finding out what users say, using interviews and surveys. Only few occurrences of the other two categories were found. We identified the company culture as one of the limiting factors for engaging users in the design process. Companies prefer to rely on experience rather than end-user input, or in some cases simply do not acknowledge the importance of user engagement. Another limiting factor is the lack of awareness and knowledge regarding user engagement; companies do not know when to use which method or how to integrate the generated output in their design process. External factors, such as concerns about confidentiality of the new ideas and client-company relation are other factors that hinder the engagement of users in the early phases of the design process. The paper concludes with a set of opportunities that can be addressed to improve user engagement in the early stages of the design process.
Increasingly, ‘app-store' releases of software are used as a vehicle for large-scale user trials ‘in the wild'. Several opportunities and methodological challenges arise from having little or no access to users, other than through the application itself. So far, researchers have needed to hardcode survey items into the software application studied, which is laborious and error prone. This paper discusses how these problems are addressed using TEMPEST, a platform for longitudinal in situ data collection. The authors illustrate the use of TEMPEST to study the deployment and real-world use of a tablet application called idAnimate; this application has been designed to support the creation of simple animations as design representations during the creative design process. The authors discuss how the tool has supported the gathering of data in over 4000 installations, both from a development and research perspective, and relate their experiences to current research perspectives on large-scale app trials.
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