Usability and User Experience Evaluation Methods

Usability and user experience are two important factors in the development of mass-customizable personalized products. A broad range of evaluation methods is available to improve products during an user-centered development process. This chapter gives an overview on these methods and how to apply them to achieve easy-to-use, efficient and effective personalized products that are additionally fun to use. A case study on the development of a new interaction technique for interactive TV helps to understand how to set up a mix of evaluation methods to cope with some of the limitations of current usability and user experience evaluation methods. The chapter concludes with some guidelines of how to change organizations to focus on usability and user experience.

Affective Human Factors Design with Ambient Intelligence for Product Ecosystems

The fulfillment of affective customers needs may award the producer extra premium in gaining a competitive edge. This entails a number of technical challenges to be addressed, such as, the elicitation, evaluation, and fulfillment of affective needs, as well as the evaluation of capability of producers to launch the planned products. To tackle these issues, this research proposes an affective human factor design framework to facilitate decision-making in designing product ecosystems. In particular, ambient intelligence techniques are applied to elicit affective customer needs. An analytical model is proposed to support affective design analysis. Utility measure and conjoint analysis are employed to quantify users’ affective satisfaction, while the producers’ capability to fulfill the respective customer needs is evaluated using a capacity index. Association rule mining techniques are applied to model the mapping of affective needs to design elements. Configuration design of product ecosystems is optimized with a heuristic genetic algorithm. A case study of designing the living room ecosystem is reported with dual considerations of customers’ satisfaction and producer’s capacities. It is demonstrated that the affective human factors design framework can effectively manage the elicitation, analysis, and fulfillment of affective customer needs.

Expected and Realized Costs and Benefits from Implementing Product Configuration Systems

Product configuration systems (PCS) are a technology well suited for mass customization and support the task of configuring the product to the individual customer’s needs. PCS are at the same time complex software systems that may be tailored to solve a variety of problems for a firm, e.g. supporting the quotation process or validating the structure of a product. This chapter reports findings from a study of 12 Danish firms, which at the time of the study have implemented or are in the process of implementing product configuration systems. 12 costs and 12 benefits are identified in literature, and using radar diagrams as a tool for data collection the relative difference are identified. While several of the firms are mass customizers it is not the primary driver for implementing PCS. The analysis reveals that expected and realized benefits are consistent: 1) Improved quality in specifications, 2) Using less resources, and 3) Lower turnaround time. Interestingly, the realized benefits are all higher than the expected benefits. The expected benefits highlight the motivation, and this has implications for human factors as they point in the direction of significant changes to come in the adopting organization. It is observed that product configuration projects are treated as simple technical projects although they should be regarded as organizational change projects.

Personalizing the TV Experience

Personalized services and products are only successful when the usage context is taken into consideration. For interactive TV services, where usage is typically taking place in a living room, the question on how to develop an interaction technique to enable personalization is central. Based on an extensive literature review a set of requirements for personalized iTV services was developed. Following these requirements, a case study from interactive TV, called vocomedia, shows the development of an interaction concept for interactive TV supporting personalization by using a fingerprint recognition.

Technological and Psychological Fundamentals of Psychological Customization Systems

Psychological Customization systems can customize the experiences of users of various information technology-based products and services. In this context customization entails the intelligent automatic or semi-automatic adaptation of information per user profile, which may systematically manipulate transient psychological states of the user such as emotion or cognition. The chapter presents the psychological and technological fundamentals of Psychological Customization and discusses an example of an application area in emotionally adapted games.

Developing Interoperability in Mass Customization Information Systems

This chapter proposes a standard-based framework to assist industrial organizations to develop interoperability in mass customization Information Systems. After identifying the major challenges for business and information systems in mass customization, the authors propose an innovative standardbased conceptual architecture for a combined model-driven and services-oriented platform. The chapter concludes by describing a global methodology for integration of models and applications, to enhance an enterprise’s interoperability in the support of mass customization practices, keeping the same organization’s technical and operational environment, but improving its methods of work and the usability of the installed technology through harmonization and integration of the enterprise models in use by customers, manufacturers, and suppliers. Its platform aims to stimulate the adoption of mass customization concepts and improve those practices through proper integration and harmonization of information system models, knowledge, and data.

Resource Implications of Manufacturer- Customer Interactions in Mass Customization

This chapter explores the relationship between the capabilities of a manufacturing system and the participation of end-users in order determination. Using a simulated customer-direct mode for the customization of selected wood products, the authors examine manufacturing system attributes that enhance direct interaction with customers. The authors discuss strategic implications of the choice of customization-mode on fundamental resource requirements, and set out practical recommendations for deploying mass customization as a competitive strategy. End-user participation in configuring customized products requires that beyond desirable attributes such as agility in manufacturing systems, compelling service capability be developed to enhance customer experience.

Adaptive Interaction for Mass Customisation

The popularisation of mass customization and the need for integration of the user needs into the design, production and marketing phases has called for more innovative methods to be introduced into this area. At present the continuous growth of the world wide web and its rapid integration into people’s everyday lives and the popularisation of new technologies such as ubiquitous computing making possible the computing everywhere paradigm, offers a more desirable alternative for vendors in reaching their customers using more innovative techniques in an attempt to provide each customer with a one-to-one design, manufacturing and marketing service. The integration of ubiquitous computing technologies with machine learning and data mining techniques, which has been popular in personalization techniques, will serve to bring about innovative changes in this area. In future years this may revolutionise the way in which vendors can reach their customers offering every customer a tailored one-to-one service from design, to manufacturing, to delivery. This chapter will present the state of the art techniques to enable the combination of machine learning, data mining and ubiquitous computing technologies which will serve to provide innovative techniques applications and user interfaces for mass customization systems. This is currently a field of intense research and development activity and some technologies are already on the path to practical application. This chapter will present a state of the art survey of these technologies and their applications.

A Dynamic User Centric Framework for Enhancing eServices Effectiveness Aiming at Mass Customization

Mass customization should be more than just configuring a specific component (hardware or software), but should be seen as the co-design of an entire system, including services, experiences and human satisfaction at the individual as well as at the community level. The main objective of this chapter is to introduce a framework, smartTag, for the dynamic reconstruction of Web content based on human factors. Human factors and users’ characteristics play the most important role during the entire design and implementation of the framework which has the inherent ability to interact with its environment and the user and transparently adapt its behaviour using intelligent techniques, reaching high levels of usability, user satisfaction, effectiveness and quality of service presentation. The initial results of the evaluation have proven that the proposed framework do not degrade the efficiency (in terms of speed and accuracy) during the Web content adaptation process as well as increases users’ satisfaction and efficiency of information processing (both in terms of accuracy and task completion time), while users navigating in the personalized condition rather than the original one.

Mass Customization with Configurable Products and Configurators

Configurable products are an important way to achieve mass customization. A configurable product is designed once, and this design is used repetitively in the sales-delivery process to produce specifications of product individuals meeting customer requirements. Configurators are information systems that support the specification of product individuals and the creation and management of configuration knowledge, therefore being prime examples of information systems supporting mass customization. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic review of literature on how mass customization with configurable products and use of configurators affect companies. In this chapter, we provide such a review. We focus on benefits that can be gained and challenges which companies may face. A supplier can move to mass customization and configuration from mass production or from full customization; we keep the concerns separate. We also review benefits and challenges from the customer perspective. Finally, we identify future research directions and open challenges and problems.