USER INTERFACE DESIGN AND EVALUATION IN A MANUFACTURING ENGINEERING CONTEXT: A USABILITY PERSPECTIVE

Studies from manufacturing industry show that the manager who empowers receives commitment and creativity in return from employees and that the effectiveness of the organization increases in this way. However, one key issue when empowering the workforce is how to create an effective flow of information within an organization. This is due to the fact that the workforce cannot take responsible actions without sufficient information about their work. Nevertheless, the right information at the right time is not enough; it is also important that individual employees receive information that is understandable and useful for them in their day-to-day work. Hence, it is important that employees experience a high level of manufacturing system usability. System usability in the manufacturing field is the central topic of this thesis, and the need for more end-user participation in the development phase is discussed. Usability can be defined as a combination of such user-oriented characteristics as: ease of learning, high speed of user task performance, low user error rate, subjective user satisfaction, and user retention over time. Thus, usability is related to the effectiveness and efficiency with which the human system can interact with the rest of the manufacturing system, and one way of increasing system usability is to use user-centred system development methods when developing the means that users use when interacting with the rest of the manufacturing system, i.e. the user interface. The use of user-centred development methods is introduced as a design paradigm to increase system usability. First, a theoretical framework is presented, in which the usability concept has a key role. The concepts of user interface management systems and of virtual manufacturing are also presented. An EC-funded project, UPSIDE, provides case material to understated why the users of a manufacturing system, which has been developed using a system-centred design approach, do not experience a high level of system usability. This is followed by the proposal of a user-centred user interface development methodology. The main goal of this methodology is to make the gap between the system user and the system itself smaller. The first and most important phase in this methodology is the study of the enduser and his tasks. High usability can only be reached if these two aspects are fully investigated. The proposed methodology has been applied in two test cases. Results from these test cases show that the methodology gives more end user involvement when developing user interfaces. Hence, the methodology will lead to a higher usability not only for that individual user, but also for other users that share the same working environment. Finally, the presented research study has not only contributed to knowledge in the automation and manufacturing communities by proposing a user-centred methodology for the development and realisation of user interfaces for machine systems, but also contributed conceptually to the manufacturing research community by proposing a combination of an architectural model of user interfaces with the a design method for modular machine systems.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Nordqvist, Anders R.

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/d1d40c03-59a5-4708-b289-123d766506c4/download