Personal Attribute Judgments - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 27

2.5 The Study

We applied this procedure in a study that aimed to identify the differences, if any,
between users' and designers' perceptions of products. Previous research has em-
phasized that designers often fail in accurately predicting users' preferences (Kujala
and Kauppinen, 2004). Design decisions may thus be largely impacted by the im-
plicit values shared within a design team. Den Ouden (2006) noted that most reasons
for product returns are attributed to decisions made early in the conceptual phase of
design, while it has been observed that often designers are unable to trace back de-
cisions made in earlier phases of development (Koca et al., 2009). In this study we
attempt to inquire into users' and designers' views on conceptual designs.

2.5.1 Method

2.5.1.1 Participants

Eleven “designers” and eleven potential end-users participated in the study. Design-
ers were employees of the R&D department of an international company develop-
ing document systems. They were all involved in the conception and realization of
TouchToPrint , which is a new way of personalizing the use of a shared printer by
means of fingerprint recognition. They ranged from usability experts and market
experts to software engineers and documentation experts. We refer to them as 'de-
signers' since they were all stakeholders in the conceptual design phase. Users were
researchers and employees from our department who had no prior knowledge of the
product under development.

2.5.1.2 Stimuli

The TouchToPrint concept and five alternative proposals for interacting with a
shared printer were selected for the triading process. These were the Touch & Se-
lect concept, which was identical to TouchToPrint but also offering modification
possibilities at the printer (e.g. final selection of documents, stapling); The Badge
concept where user identification takes place by holding an identity badge close to
asensor;the Scroll List concept where user identification takes place by scrolling
through a list of usernames; The Pin Code concept where the user types her per-
sonal pin code to identify herself to the printer; and the Direct Print concept where
no user identification is required, which reflects the most common interaction today.
All concepts were presented in the form of storyboards describing a usage scenario
of the relevant concept and highlighting the specific details of the relevant concept
(see figure 2.4).

2.5.1.3 Procedure

The six storyboards were combined in three triads , i.e. combinations of three ele-
ments. These three triads were expected to elicit user perceptions related to three