Translating User Requirements Research Articles

Research on the Whole Life Cycle of a Furniture Design and Development System Based on Sustainable Design Theory

With the development of society, the negative impact of furniture waste on the environment has become increasingly prominent. Therefore, it has become essential to integrate sustainable design principles into furniture manufacturing. This integration can significantly extend the service life of furniture products and reduce the adverse impact on the environment. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to actively conduct market research and an in-depth understanding of users’ needs for sustainable furniture design. Among them, applying the AHP-QFD-AD method to develop a comprehensive design evaluation model is a practical way. This model can translate user requirements into explicit functional requirements and further refine them into specific design parameters. Accurately reflecting user needs in product design greatly improves the accuracy of design evaluation, thereby reducing environmental impact throughout the product life cycle. By implementing this integrated model, we can move furniture products in a sustainable direction. In addition, this method can also enhance the connection between the user and the product, extend the service life of the product, and reduce the waste of furniture. Using sustainable shelving development as an example, we validate the proposed method model. This study reduces the harm of discarded furniture to the environment, providing some support for sustainable furniture design practices.

Integrated framework of knowledge-based decision support system for user-centered residential design

A user-oriented residential environment is considered essential to providing occupants with a comfortable living experience while meeting their demands. However, design assessment in the early stage of residential design is a complex problem due to multifactor coupling, the diversity in user needs, and the incompleteness of design knowledge. This study proposes an integrated framework of knowledge-based decision support system (KBDSS) to mitigate such problems. In this framework, the user segmentation is performed in accordance with people’s particular requirements priority and, thus, enables design decisions that create better satisfaction among a wider audience. Meanwhile, the quality function deployment approach, decision support system, and fuzzy set theory are used to translate user requirements into quantifiable design specifications, thereby making the design a multicriteria decision-making problem. To illustrate and validate the proposed framework, a case study of a KBDSS for a multiunit residential building kitchen design is demonstrated to explore a user-centered residential design with such decision support. This proposed framework provides naive design practitioners with specific knowledge about decision problems and assists them in consistently making user-centered design decisions. The research results represent a further step toward a systematic methodology of user-centered built environment design.

Enhancement of Ant Colony Optimization for QoS-Aware Web Service Selection

In service-oriented computing, web services composition is the process of translating user requirements into a workflow. This workflow comprises many tasks, each of which includes an abstract definition for some of the user requirements. Web services can be aggregated to handle the workflow. Many of these services are available from various providers for each task; they are referred to, in aggregate, as the candidate list. The web service selection (WSS) problem centers on selecting the best service from these candidates based on the quality of service (QoS) features. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm based on a swap concept for the QoS-aware WSS problem. The aim of the enhancement to the ACO is to avoid the trap of local optima and reduce the search duration. We believe that the integration of many potent solutions will help the ACO algorithm yield a better solution and avoid stagnation. Several experiments were conducted to compare the proposed algorithm with the ACO and flying ACO (FACO) algorithms. Two different types of experiments using 22 datasets were done with 30 independent repetitions. The first type of experiment's results shows that the proposed algorithm is better than ACO by 12% and FACO by 11% in terms of quality of solutions. The results in the second type of experiment show that the proposed algorithm continuously outperforms both algorithms in terms of quality of solutions.

Design and evaluation of silage equipment control panel based on the theory of emotional design and Kansei Engineering

In order to make the silage equipment control panel meet user needs better and translate user requirements into product design elements, this paper puts forward the design model of silage equipment control panel based on the theory of emotional design and Kansei Engineering. Firstly, qualitative and quantitative analyses of silage equipment control panel were conducted according to the results of the user survey. Then, the prior design elements and the “Feature-Vocabulary” correspondence were obtained, which were applied to the design of silage equipment control panel. Finally, the design plan was evaluated using semantic differential method. As a result, it is initially verified that the design model has certain feasibility for translating user requirements into product design elements.

Experiences of multidisciplinary development team members during user-centered design of telecare products and services: a qualitative study.

BackgroundUser-centered design (UCD) methodologies can help take the needs and requirements of potential end-users into account during the development of innovative telecare products and services. Understanding how members of multidisciplinary development teams experience the UCD process might help to gain insight into factors that members with different backgrounds consider critical during the development of telecare products and services.ObjectiveThe primary objective of this study was to explore how members of multidisciplinary development teams experienced the UCD process of telecare products and services. The secondary objective was to identify differences and similarities in the barriers and facilitators they experienced.MethodsTwenty-five members of multidisciplinary development teams of four Research and Development (R&D) projects participated in this study. The R&D projects aimed to develop telecare products and services that can support self-management in elderly people or patients with chronic conditions. Seven participants were representatives of end-users (elderly persons or patients with chronic conditions), three were professional end-users (geriatrician and nurses), five were engineers, four were managers (of R&D companies or engineering teams), and six were researchers. All participants were interviewed by a researcher who was not part of their own development team. The following topics were discussed during the interviews: (1) aim of the project, (2) role of the participant, (3) experiences during the development process, (4) points of improvement, and (5) what the project meant to the participant.ResultsExperiences of participants related to the following themes: (1) creating a development team, (2) expectations regarding responsibilities and roles, (3) translating user requirements into technical requirements, (4) technical challenges, (5) evaluation of developed products and services, and (6) valorization. Multidisciplinary team members from different backgrounds often reported similar experienced barriers (eg, different members of the development team speak a “different language”) and facilitators (eg, team members should voice expectations at the start of the project to prevent miscommunication at a later stage). However, some experienced barriers and facilitators were reported only by certain groups of participants. For example, only managers reported the experience that having different ideas about what a good business case is within one development team was a barrier, whereas only end-users emphasized the facilitating role of project management in end-user participation and the importance of continuous feedback from researchers on input of end-users.ConclusionsMany similarities seem to exist between the experienced barriers and facilitators of members of multidisciplinary development teams during UCD of telecare products and services. However, differences in experiences between team members from various backgrounds exist as well. Insights into these similarities and differences can improve understanding between team members from different backgrounds, which can optimize collaboration during the development of telecare products and services.

The error budget process: an example from environmental remote sensing

The process of translating user requirements into technological specifications using mathematical models is described using the example of mission requirements for designing the next generation environmental satellites. The analysis provides an end-to-end traceability from the user mission figures of merit to the software algorithm and hardware sensor design specifications. The models employ a wide range of error budget mathematical analysis tools that are easily executed using a spreadsheet program on a desktop computer. The analysis also shows that the infrared sensor in the existing satellites does not meet the user needs for identifying thin cirrus clouds and that the proposed sensor for the next generation satellites will easily meet the proposed performance user requirement. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Syst Eng 1: 303–313, 1998

Structured Brainstorming: A Method for Collecting User Requirements

This paper describes the Structured Brainstorming process employed by IBM's Networking Systems Customer Requirements department for collecting, analyzing, and deploying product requirements. Structured Brainstorming relies on the user's job and product experience to generate ideas for product requirements. Structured Brainstorming elicits these requirements from the users through a series of group and individual activities. After identifying the core ideas, users assign them priorities and assign satisfaction scores for current products. This information may be used to build a House of Quality (HOQ) within Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to organize and translate user requirements into design specifications. The authors offer guidelines and suggestions based on their experience with the technique.

Development of a Requirements Classification Scheme for Automated Support of Software Development

Computer hardware technology has advanced to the point where it is feasible to develop software systems that exceed one million lines of code. Software engineering, the discipline concerned with developing these systems, typically includes the following phases in the software development cycle: requirements phase, design phase, implementation phase, test phase and the installation and checkout phase [IEEE, 1983]. This paper is concerned with a classification scheme to support knowledge-based analysis of software requirements. Because requirements in these large systems can become quite numerous and complex, it is a very difficult task to analyze them in order to identify potential problems, i.e., problems that may arise in later phases, such as incompleteness, conflict, ambiguity, and absence of testability. Current software productivity tools such as CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering), executable requirements languages, prototyping tools, and test harnesses provide much assistance in later phases of software development, but not much for the requirements phase. It is well-known in software engineering that the most costly and profound software errors are likely to occur at the requirements definition phase, early in the software development cycle. The productivity tools mentioned earlier either work from code which has been developed for the system. or work with user requirements statements which have been translated into a restricted, formal language. There are several problems with translating user requirements into a formal language very early in the project First, it is difficult for the user to understand requirements as they have been translated and interpreted by the systems analyst. Second, the systems analyst may have made wrong assumptions or interpretations in the process of translation. Finally, formal languages do not have any provision for ambiguity, and early in the requirements phase, ambiguities may exist, to be worked out as more is learned about the system.