Vol. 64, No. 3, November 2018
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Goutam K. Saha |
Soft reliability problems are defined here as customer experienced problems with an “in-specification” product. User experiences relating to functional, emotional, and social aspects of product use in various geographical, cultural, or situational contexts remain as a growing and uncontrollable problem. Soft Reliability relates to the industrial problem that a large and rapidly increasing share of user complaints in the field, especially relating to adaptive, embedded, intelligent products, cannot be attributed to violation of products’ technical specifications. That is, the major portion of product rejections today tend to be not due to traditional (i.e., hard) reliability problems that can be resolved by repair or replacement of defective parts, but rather due to Soft Reliability problems that require either instructional guidance for the user or adaptive redesign of the product
Nonetheless, current operational quality analysis and evaluation methods do not employ a Soft Reliability perspective, and as such, market feedback from the field (about situational/contextual use factors) is not effectively utilized in new product development processes to collaboratively improve the quality of products and processes. However, consumers are anything but logical, and feature proliferation does not necessarily translate into increased consumer demand. It often backfires, and consumers that would have purchased become cautious or frustrated by the proliferation of buttons. A recent study by Elke den Ouden of Philips Electronics found that at least half of returned products actually had nothing wrong with them–consumers simply couldn’t figure out how to properly use them.
New Product Development NPD approach based on the continuous utilization of field feedback from real customers for evaluation of product design is needed. This is to dynamically sense and adapt to the fast evolving needs and expectations of global markets. In particular continuous summative user experience evaluation based on the inflow is useful for understanding the Soft Reliability problem domain. Ontological approach utilization, decision support technique for information deployment, product observation approach for capturing the relevant user interactions with a product or semantic mining approach for a rich or possible combined analysis of user experiences feedback in the context of user actions are all effective approaches for SR domain. Structured longitudinal and meaningful user experience data collection and analysis becomes possible for both summative product evaluation after products’ release to the market and for formative product evaluation during product development.
There is a steadily growing body of detailed knowledge in the human-computer interaction domain about not just the usability of interactive products, but also about the holistic view of the psychological and social impact of products in people’s lives, user experience of products [A Koca et al, S Iyengar, S Husk]. Operational models about the pleasure, fun, aesthetics, and hedonic qualities in the use of interactive products have not yet matured to be consistently used in practice. In fact, even the research on methods for the assessment of users’ experiences is only at its infancy, despite the wealth of methods and techniques that are available for assessing the usability of interactive products.
Therefore, to help extracting the actual in situ user experiences from field usage of products, the proposed ontological approach proves as an operationalizable model that enables product developers to be aware of and to be systematically responsive to the growing and uncontrollable problem of unforeseen user experiences in the field.