Emotional Responses to Virtual Prototypes in the Design Evaluation of a Product Concept

Abstract

The topic of this paper is a spin-off from a study in a much larger ‘VIRPI—Research and Development Project on Virtual Prototyping Services for the Electronics and Telecommunications Industries’ project. A number of Finnish universities and companies participated in VIRPI, which was funded by the companies and the National Technology Agency TEKES. The goal of the research was to develop virtual prototyping techniques for use in product development. The aim of one of the subprojects of VIRPI was to study the use of Internet-based virtual prototypes for usability testing. The result was that virtual prototypes can be used in usability evaluation, that task-based tests seem more beneficial than the free exploration approach, and that emphasis and further research must be directed to the design of the data logging (Kuutti, Sade and Battarbee 1999; Battarbee et al. 1999). In the study, a usability test with a virtual reality modelling language (VRML) model was simulated. An interactive VRML model of a rather simple conceptual mobile phone was placed in a web browser window, where it could be manipulated, and its buttons could be pressed to navigate in its user interface with the according feedback on its display. The fictive product concept was a very small mobile phone with no numeric keypad, to be used as an extension for a communicator. The VRML model was not a very high fidelity prototype aesthetically, which is typical for virtual reality models, because they must be light enough, in terms of computer file size to be manipulated through the Internet. A VRML model is not as precise and detailed as a Computer Aided Design (CAD) model, but it can represent the interactivity of the product. ‘Virtual reality prototyping is a process in which a product or a product concept, its behaviour and usage are simulated as realistically as possible using computer models and virtual reality techniques’ (Kerttula 1999). In the course of comparing the task-based approach to free exploration as the usability testing strategy, users were shown a physical model of the concept at the end of the