Perceived Usability of Seating in an Outpatient Waiting Area: A Combined Approach Utilizing Virtual Reality and Actual Seating Prototypes

Abstract

Objective: This study proposed a combined methodology to evaluate the perceived usability of healthcare seats that were first selected in a virtual waiting room which provided the context of use for the seats. Background: There has been an increased interest in using virtual reality (VR) for evaluation of seating in interior environments. Although VR offers a less expensive approach compared to evaluating seats in situ, using VR has limitations as users cannot experience the actual seat prototypes. Method: Participants ( N = 92) experienced a virtual waiting room with various seat groupings and were prompted with four task-based scenarios through which they selected a seat. After the VR phase, they experienced their selected seats in a lab and used an online questionnaire to evaluate the seating. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to garner similarities and differences in participants’ experience of virtual and real seats. Results: Three categories including comfort, support, and flexibility were extracted from the questionnaire. While support and comfort categories were highly ranked by participants, the category rankings varied depending on participants’ age, gender, tasks, and seat types. Interviews revealed that there were differences in experience of the seating materials in VR versus reality, and therefore experiencing the real seats was useful in seating evaluation. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the combined methodology using VR and real seating in a lab is a reliable tool for designers and furniture manufacturers to obtain users’ perceived usability evaluation of seating during the design process while the actual context is absent.

Using Architectural Mapping to Understand Behavior and Space Utilization in a Surgical Waiting Room of a Safety Net Hospital

“…Investigators found that water fountains, while provided inside the hospital, were not optimized for patient and family access because they were too far away for parents in the waiting room to make infant formula [ 38 ]. Another study used virtual reality to show that participants considered factors such as seat comfort, visual and auditory privacy, and access to information when choosing a seat while waiting and that the priority of these factors shifted depending on their reason for waiting [ 39 ]. Only a few studies have focused on waiting spaces for vulnerable populations in specialty ambulatory care settings, despite the longer wait times and lower satisfaction rates [ 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 ].…”

Assessing Spatial User Experience for Design Guidelines: A Comparative Study of Outpatient Waiting Rooms With Conventional Versus Modern Features

“…The latest contributions to this subject mainly address the positive impacts of environmental elements such as daylight (Pouyesh et al, 2018), scents (Fenko & Loock, 2014; Higuera-Trujillo et al, 2020), interactive media and aquarium (Biddiss et al, 2019), vegetation (Blaschke et al, 2017; Higuera-Trujillo et al, 2020), images of natural landscapes (Watts et al, 2016), and music and nature sounds (Fenko & Loock, 2014; Higuera-Trujillo et al, 2020; Pouyesh et al, 2018; Watts et al, 2016) on patients’ and visitors’ anxiety levels. There are also studies exploring comfort perceptions in the waiting room based on seat features such as stability and capacity to support users of different ages and sizes (Jafarifiroozabadi et al, 2022) and the introduction of Feng Shui principles (Margolies, 2020), which aim to achieve the environment energy balance and users’ harmony with their surroundings (Bazley et al, 2016).…”