There is a lack of design advice on how to construct usable virtual environment (VE) systems, even though major usability problems have been reported. This paper details the development and evaluation of a design advice tool for presenting usability guidance to VE designers. The guidance was derived from theoretical work on human-computer interaction in VEs, which detailed stages of interactive...

Semiotic Engineering perceives interfaces as messages designers send to users. This message has an interaction model for syntax and the application’s functionality for semantics. In order to create these messages, designers need models, tools and techniques that allow them to express themselves. In this article, we propose that User Interface Design Languages (UIDL’s) in which designers can des...

Industrial design training is embracing the need for designers to elicit user needs in order to support the development of successful new products. This paper highlights the collaboration of an ergonomist and two industrial designers in the development of a range of mainstream domestic consumer products. It documents the experiences gained in applying and adapting focus group techniques to info...

Users of medical devices attach not only great importance to the functionality, but also to the joy of use, which is subject of the product design. Up to now, approaches in industrial design mainly take pragmatic aspects (functionality) into account and neglect hedonic aspects (attractiveness). Thus, to consider pragmatic and hedonic aspects in the process of product design, there is a need to ...

In participatory design users are involved in the design process, but oftentimes in industrial practice this involvement is limited to specific moments (e.g., a user study or a user test). Then designers have to work with indirect results about users. This paper describes a study about promoting empathy in conveying user insights to designers who have been partly or not even involved in meeting...

Because of the extension of mission duration time, the new targets of human exploration (Moon and Mars) require a deeper investigation of issues related to human being and habitability in space. This entails that engineering disciplines will be integrated in multidisciplinary teams. This raises the problem of the definition of an interdisciplinary process that can allow people from different di...

designers draw diagrams to think about architectural concepts and design concerns. scientists are interested in programming computers to recognize and interpret design diagrams to deliver appropriate tools for the design task at hand. researchers conducted empirical studies to find out if designers share drawing conventions when designing. the experiment results show that designers use differen...