Generating a user manual in the early design phase to guide the design activities

Abstract

In order to improve product performance, this paper provides specific guidance for designers to take product usage information into account in the early design phase. Firstly, the influence of design modification on design process is presented. Secondly, by reviewing some helpful studies, the primary reasons of the design modification occur after prototyping phase is stated. Thirdly, we propose that a user manual can be created before prototyping stage to direct the design activities. We define the design process as 3 levels, function level, task level, and behavior level. At the function level, designers decompose the high-level function into sub-functions until elementary level that all elementary functions are arranged in a pre-determined order. At the task level, designers allocate each elementary function to machine, user, or interactive between the two. At the behavior level, Designers study the interrelationships between user’s behavior and structure’s behavior to examine whether the interactions meet the required performance or not. Finally, the simple case verifies the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method in this paper.