20100922 - Govindaraju, ..Design Guideline to manufacture Useable consumer products

Development of generic design guidelines to manufacture usable consumer products by Govindaraju, Majorkumar, Ph.D., University of Cincinnati, 1999 , 338 pages; AAT 9933654 My Interest: (1) Product Usability Checklist = UET. (2) Checklists – test the Reliability and Validity. (3) Questionnaire – test the Validity. (4) 9 product attributes affecting Usability. Action: Very low priority – to read the Dissertation in future. Because Dissertation is scanned version. Motivation Global competition, concern for the environment, and the need for customization are forcing manufacturers to produce usable products at affordable prices. For a product to be successful in the market place, it is essential to determine what constitutes usability and then to design it in the product, and ensure it through manufacturing. Research Goal This dissertation work was aimed at developing a generic procedure to manufacture usable consumer products using design guidelines in the form of checklists. Nine product attributes that affect the usability were analyzed. Two sets of generic checklists, one for evaluating the product usability and the other consisting of design and manufacture guidelines, were developed. Information necessary for developing these checklists was obtained through a variety of sources such as users, manufacturers, published literature, and design handbooks. Methodology & Results – Design & Manufacturing Checklist Based on the generic guidelines for design and manufacture, a corresponding set of customized checklists was derived for a specific product, a hybrid bicycle. A study involving 10 bicycle models was conducted to test the two sets of questionnaires in which 22 bicycle users and 10 bicycle manufacturers participated. Eight of these bicycles were tested on two users each and the other two bicycles were tested on three users each. Design and manufacturing guideline checklists were filled by ten designers, one each from the ten manufacturers. The checklists were first tested for reliability and validity. The Cronbach alpha values of all the 18 questionnaires were found to be more than 0.4. In the test for validity all the questionnaires were found to be statistically significant (p < 0.05). Correlation with Usability Evaluation Score To evaluate the effectiveness of the design and manufacturing checklists in producing more usable products, an analysis was performed by grouping the data by bicycle models and testing to find if the design/manufacture guideline implementation score correlated with the usability evaluation score. All the usability criteria excepting customizability showed a positive and significant correlation (p < 0.05). Conclusion These results suggest that if the guidelines for design and manufacture are implemented during product design it will result in more usable products. This generic procedure can be extended to develop manufacturing guidelines for any specific product for designing usable consumer products. Comments: My impression is that this Dissertation will be boring to read. He seemed to love the Statistics part….my gut feeling. Note: Softcopy Dissertation is scanned version; so cannot copy and paste. No point reading…won't be able to blog it.