A Formative Evaluation of a Feature Extraction and Process Planning Tool

It is a common problem that many computer tools intended to enhance human performance in design or manufacturing planning do not do so. In many cases they may actually degrade performance. One way to increase the probability that a tool will meet users needs is to include frequent periodic usability assessments in the development process so feedback from users can be incorporated in new iterations of the software design. This paper describes an example of one such assessment applied to a MEDIATOR, a feature extraction and process planning tool for assisting process planners to explore plan options more quickly and thoroughly. There exists a wide variety of usability assessment techniques which can mostly be divided into two broad categories: summative evaluations which provide in-depth assessments in the final stages of software development, and formative evaluations which tend to be smaller in scale and are used to provide guidance for “forming” subsequent software versions during the development cycle. In this work, we describe a formative usability assessment. The study indicated that MEDIATOR was meeting its design goal of broadening the users exploration of manufacturing options, in some cases producing high quality manufacturing options which the expert users had not considered on their own. The study also provided formative redesign information gleaned which will help future versions of MEDIATOR to better meet the actual needs of process planners.