Automated Usability and User Experience Assessment for Smart Products

Abstract

The ever-increasing demand for user-centred smart products has driven the need for automation methodologies in product design processes, particularly for assessing usability and user experience (UX). Traditionally, practitioners construct functional (software) or physical (hardware) product prototypes to enable usability and UX assessments. Constructing a prototype followed by human testing are both time consuming and expensive activities. If virtual models and automated methods can replace some components of these activities, the time and cost of smart product development could be reduced while continuing to generate useful and beneficial products. In this paper, we survey the literature related to automated assessment methods for designing user-centric smart products. We identified five key activities on which to focus related to the testing or the design cycle: design thinking, design ideation, prototype creation, user data collection, and data analysis. The review methodology consisted of comprehensive search queries tailored to each activity to encapsulate automation methods pertinent to smart product development in research articles published from 2000-2023. Over 100 relevant articles were identified across engineering, human-computer interaction, human factors, industrial design, and other disciplines. This review highlights the effectiveness and limitations of various automation methods, benchmarked against traditional practice, providing valuable insights and practical recommendations for researchers and designers seeking to optimize smart product design processes for broad usability concerns. We are particularly interested in designing assistive mobility and rehabilitation devices. Development time and resources are often limited yet usability and UX directly impact important outcomes including perceived function, stigma, and device adoption. Improving these requires a transdisciplinary approach.