Towards Establishing Foundations for New Classes of Reliability Problems Concerning Strongly Innovative Products

Quality & Reliability Eng

Funk

Karapanos

et al. 2008

A recent trend in technological innovation is towards the development of increasingly multifunctional and complex products to be used within rich socio-cultural contexts such as the high-end office, the digital home, and professional or personal healthcare. One important consequence of the development of strongly innovative products is a growing market uncertainty regarding 'if', 'how', and 'when' users can and will adopt such products. Often, it is not even clear to what extent these products are understood and interacted with in the intended manner. The mentioned problems have already become an evident concern in the field, where there is a significant rise in the numbers of seemingly sound products being complained about, signaling a lack of soft reliability. In this paper, we position soft reliability as a growing and critical industrial problem, whose solution requires new academic expertise from various disciplines. We illustrate potential root causes for soft reliability problems, such as discrepancy between the perceptions of users and designers. We discuss the necessary approach to effectively capture subjective feedback data from actual users, e.g. when they contact call centers. Furthermore, we present a novel observation and analysis approach that enables insight into actual product usage, and outline opportunities for combining such objective data with the subjective feedback provided by users.

Section: Background On Soft Reliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Soft reliability: an interdisciplinary approach with a user–system focus

Quality & Reliability Eng

Funk

Karapanos

et al. 2008

“…Our ongoing research on soft reliability [6,7,8] deals with the so called "broken expectations" of users [1], i.e. field cases where products are being returned, or being sought redress for, that in fact technically function well according to specifications.…”

Section: Soft Reliability In a Nutshellmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extracting "broken expectations" from call center records

CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Brombacher

2008

Self Cite

Currently, despite the explicit industrial consideration to improve the appeal and usability of technically sound electronics products, users increasingly seem to have dissatisfactory experiences in interacting with them. These unforeseen experiences (attributable to specifications omissions, usability/learnability problems, or specific usage context) lead to a large and increasing share of unknown field complaints. To correct and prevent such complaints or user reports, we promote effective exploitation of call centers: Valuable usage data is retrievable from the field by adopting a usercentered failure classification model, which we developed. We also report on the supporting results of a test from applying our model to a set of call center data.

“…Based on stakeholder requirements, qualitative data may provide information regarding the failures and the successes of the product-concept based on the match between product capabilities and user expectations (i.e. negative and positive disconfirmation of user expectations) [16], and further based on how the consecutive "phases of use" of the product are being experienced by the user [5]. The model we developed (a.k.a.…”

Section: Information Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grasping product pragmatics

Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Designing Interactive User Experiences for TV and Video

Funk

Karapanos

et al. 2008

Self Cite

With the emergence of highly interactive products in the domestic space, consumer electronics brands are facing an increasing challenge in predicting the way their products are being used and experienced. Unforeseen experiences relating to functional, emotional and social/contextual aspects of product use lead to a large and increasing share of field complaints that cannot be attributed to a violation of products' specifications. In a project called Soft Reliability, we are trying to develop a product evaluation ecology that enables the anticipation of product use by gathering behavioral and attitudinal data early in the product development process, through longitudinal field studies with working prototypes. This paper introduces a novel framework for behavioral and attitudinal data collection and analysis. The framework enables instrumentation that relies on the event-based experience sampling method, and as such deploys an analysis methodology that includes process mining techniques for the analysis of usage patterns, multivariate techniques for the analysis of longitudinal attitudinal data, and product quality analysis techniques for the analysis of combined information. We illustrate the value and applicability of this framework in practice, through the findings of an ongoing project concerning the conceptualization of an innovative Internet on TV product, which is being conducted in collaboration with Philips, a multi-national consumer electronics company.