Deploying Robots in a Production Environment: A Study on Temporal Transitions of Workers’ Experiences

Abstract

Abstract. Understanding a worker's perspective when introducing robots at humans' workplaces is crucial to improve human-robot interaction in production environments. Taking a temporal perspective on workers' experiences with robots, we explored expectations and general attitudes as well as actual feelings and reflections regarding the deployment of robots in a semiconductor factory. To evoke reports on workers' experiences, we applied a narrative interview technique with 10 workers. To characterize the temporal transition of workers' experiences, we distinguished between three phases in the deployment process: expectations before the deployment of the robots, familiarization with the robots, and experienced consequences of working with the robots. We present characteristic experiences of each phase and describe how these experiences change over time regarding the perceived functional value of the robots, work organization, feelings, social environment, and attitudes. Overall, our research contributes leverage points towards a more positive experience of workers when deploying robots in a factory.

Insights from User Experience Research in the Factory: What to Consider in Interaction Design

“…For example, we recognized that workers' experiences and attitudes are closely linked to specific incidents (e.g., the deployment of a robot), and that deeper investigation of such incidents provides knowledge about the dynamics and changes of workers' experiences. Therefore, we retrospectively investigated how workers experienced the deployment of a robot [21] and put a focus on the temporal transitions of workers' experiences in this context [43]. Such insights enrich the understanding of the UX factors in terms of comprehensively looking at experiential processes of workers in the factory.…”

Towards an optimal design of natural human interaction mechanisms for a service robot with ancillary way-finding capabilities in industrial environments

“…UX is subjective, dynamic and context-dependent (Law et al, 2009). For that reason, it has to be measured in user studies that can obtain a snapshot of this metric, which may in future serve as baseline for the analysis of the evolution of such UX, once in use (Wurhofer et al, 2015).…”

Ordinary User Experiences at Work

“…In particular, UX at work may involve both pragmatic qualities and strong positive features such as hedonic qualities [16,105]. A series of recent studies of UX in industry contexts has found indicators and examples of the hedonic qualities of technology use in workers' UX [26,37,[110][111][112]66,70,80,83,92,94,96,105]. Therefore, we would expect that hedonic qualities and positive experiences loom large in the four elements of UX at work (Figure 1).…”