Knowledge-based Asynchronous Usability Test Environments for Consumer Products

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The primary goal of the proposed research is to develop methodologies to realize fully autonomous usability testing applications. The motivations for the proposed research program and thus the rationale are comprised of the following: It is crucial for companies to shorten their design cycle times, increase quality, minimize design flaws that cause manufacturing and assembly problems, and comply with customer requirements. The usability tests are intended to evaluate design from the user's perspective. Usage of physical prototypes in usability, manufacturability and assembly testing is expensive, time-consuming, and inflexible. Virtual prototyping is a solution to this problem where low-cost and highly flexible design and development support is possible. Hence, our focus will be the development of Virtual Reality based asynchronous remote usability testing applications. There are three known drawbacks of the remote usability tests: post-hoc data analysis; the lack of real-time assistance; and difficulty of implementing think-aloud protocol. Advancements in ontology and semantic web researches and the real-time tracking capabilities of VR give us the opportunity to develop successful asynchronous remote usability tests that incorporate automated data analysis, think-aloud strategy and remote test supervisor. Thus, the goal in this research program is to contribute to the knowledge that is essential to develop asynchronous, VR based remote usability testing applications. This research program will contribute to train two PhD students and two MASc students in the field of information systems and product design.