Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper aims to optimize the product design of nail tables and chairs and enhance user satisfaction. It proposes a comprehensive and visualized design process for developing dual-category user products that balance the needs of two distinct user groups: nail technicians and customers. Leveraging the Kano model, DEMATEL method, and TRIZ theory, the process includes four key steps: gathering dual-category user requirements, categorizing requirement attributes, analyzing the interrelationships between requirements, and resolving design conflicts. Using the design of nail tables and chairs as a case study, the paper empirically demonstrates how to balance the operational efficiency of nail technicians with the customer experience. This approach not only optimizes the design of nail tables and chairs but also offers valuable insights for requirement prioritization and iterative development of other dual-category user products.

Evolution in the Copernicus Space Component is foreseen in the mid-2020s to meet priority user needs not addressed by the existing infrastructure, and/or to reinforce existing services. In this context, the European Commission is intending to evaluate the overall potential utility of a complementary Copernicus hyperspectral mission to be added to the Copernicus Sentinels fleet. Hyperspectral imaging is a powerful remote sensing technology that, allowing the characterization and quantification of Earth surface materials, has the potential to deliver significant enhancements in quantitative value-added products. This study aims to illustrate the interaction methodology that was set up to collect and assess user-driven requirements in different thematic areas to demonstrate the potential benefit of a future Copernicus hyperspectral mission. Therefore, an ad hoc interaction matrix was circulated among several user communities to gather preferences about hyperspectral-based products and services. The results show how the involvement of several user communities strengthens the identification of these user requirements. Moreover, the requirement evaluation is used to identify potential opportunities of hyperspectral imaging in addressing operational needs associated with policy obligations at European, national, and local levels. The frequency distribution of spectral range classes and spatial and temporal resolutions are also derived from the preference expressed by the user communities in each thematic area investigated.

To improve requirement specification skills, it is vital to detect ambiguous requirements in order to correct them later. Thus, to help software engineering students improve their capacity to identify ambiguous user requirements (requirements that do not use technical words) while providing them with a valuable and engaging educational experience, the current study proposes a serious game called DEAR. It consists of a didactic exercise in which participants must move different requirements left or right to indicate whether they are ambiguous or unambiguous. To assess the improvement in students’ abilities in requirement specification and perceptions about the training class when using the DEAR game, we conducted an experiment with 62 participants, splitting them into two groups: one that used the DEAR game and the other that underwent a conventional training session. It was found that, during the training sessions, both groups became more adept at identifying unambiguous user requirements, but there was no discernible difference in performance between them. However, the game group expressed a stronger preference for the training session’s engagement and quality, as well as a stronger sense of having learned how to clearly define user requirements. Overall, the experiment shows that the suggested serious game DEAR may be a helpful teaching tool that yields learning outcomes comparable to those of a chalkboard class while encouraging students to identify unambiguous user requirements in an interactive manner.

Background Increased digitalization of healthcare comes along with the cost of cybercrime proliferation. This results to patients’ and healthcare providers' skepticism to adopt Health Information Technologies (HIT). In Europe, this shortcoming hampers efficient cross-border health data exchange, which requires a holistic, secure and interoperable framework. This study aimed to provide the foundations for designing a secure and interoperable toolkit for cross-border health data exchange within the European Union (EU), conducted in the scope of the KONFIDO project. Particularly, we present our user requirements engineering methodology and the obtained results, driving the technical design of the KONFIDO toolkit. Methods Our methodology relied on four pillars: (a) a gap analysis study, reviewing a range of relevant projects/initiatives, technologies as well as cybersecurity strategies for HIT interoperability and cybersecurity; (b) the definition of user scenarios with major focus on cross-border health data exchange in the three pilot countries of the project; (c) a user requirements elicitation phase containing a threat analysis of the business processes entailed in the user scenarios, and (d) surveying and discussing with key stakeholders, aiming to validate the obtained outcomes and identify barriers and facilitators for HIT adoption linked with cybersecurity and interoperability. Results According to the gap analysis outcomes, full adherence with information security standards is currently not universally met. Sustainability plans shall be defined for adapting existing/evolving frameworks to the state-of-the-art. Overall, lack of integration in a holistic security approach was clearly identified. For each user scenario, we concluded with a comprehensive workflow, highlighting challenges and open issues for their application in our pilot sites. The threat analysis resulted in a set of 30 user goals in total, documented in detail. Finally, indicative barriers of HIT acceptance include lack of awareness regarding HIT risks and legislations, lack of a security-oriented culture and management commitment, as well as usability constraints, while important facilitators concern the adoption of standards and current efforts for a common EU legislation framework. Conclusions Our study provides important insights to address secure and interoperable health data exchange, while our methodological framework constitutes a paradigm for investigating diverse cybersecurity-related risks in the health sector.

Designing new products according to user needs and requirements is a key success factor for companies. However, the characterization of user requirements in the early design stages is not an easy task due to the subjective nature of these requirements and because of the communication gap between users and designers. Digital design tools have the potential to enable users to actively participate in the design process and to directly interact with representations of the future product. Yet, they suffer a trade-off between their ability to accurately represent the user experience with the future product and their capacity to offer simple interfaces for the end user to manipulate. To overcome this issue, we introduce a new modular digital tool that allows users to become active participants of the design process through a high level of both immersion and control. The tool consists in a combination of a virtual reality environment for immersion and intuitive physical interfaces for direct control, resulting in a mixed reality hardware/software system. The hardware is made of modular tangible user interfaces (TUIs), custom-made by 3D printing and powered by a 3D game engine while the interactive content is displayed in virtual reality. The modularity of the system allows several TUIs and 3D content behaviours configurations to bring user friendliness and intuitively for each specific design project.

User requirements are the core driving force behind the iterative development of complex products. Their comprehensive collection, accurate interpretation, and effective integration directly affect design outcomes. However, current practices often depend heavily on single-source data and designer intuition, resulting in incomplete, biased, and fragile design decisions. Moreover, multi-source heterogeneous user requirements often exhibit inherent asymmetry and imbalance in both structure and contribution. To address these issues, this study proposes a symmetric and balanced optimization method for multi-source heterogeneous user requirements in complex product design. Multiple acquisition and analysis approaches are integrated to mitigate the limitations of single-source data by fusing complementary information and enabling balanced decision-making. Firstly, unstructured text data from online reviews are used to extract initial user requirements, and a topic analysis method is applied for modeling and clustering. Secondly, user interviews are analyzed using a fuzzy satisfaction analysis, while eye-tracking experiments capture physiological behavior to support correlation analysis between internal preferences and external behavior. Finally, a cooperative game-based model is introduced to optimize conflicts among data sources, ensuring fairness in decision-making. The method was validated using a case study of oxygen concentrators. The findings demonstrate improvements in both decision robustness and requirement representation.

A renewed understanding of service as a process of resource application and integration, rather than as digital or physical products, shifts the focus of service engineering to the value-creating relationships among entities within complex socio-technical service systems. This understanding is based on Service-Dominant Logic (S-D Logic), a recognized perspective on value creation in modern economies. Goal-oriented modeling, in particular when integrating agent-oriented principles, has been shown to be a suitable method for designing and developing service systems based on S-D Logic principles. Yet, the impact of S-D Logic on the nature and scope of requirements to be elicited and analyzed when designing a service system using goal-oriented modeling has not been clearly articulated. We propose a domain-specific profile of the Goal-oriented Requirement Language, a goal-oriented modeling language part of the User Requirements Notation standard, as well as a set of heuristics for eliciting requirements for service systems. Both are derived from a metamodel of service systems based on S-D Logic principles. Using a case study of a telemonitoring service, we demonstrate that using the heuristics to generate a requirements model for the design of the service results in a more complete set of requirements than existing solutions for telemonitoring services. The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the impact of S-D Logic on service engineering, pointing toward the need for more research on the impact of operationalized domain theories on requirements engineering.

Accurately identifying and classifying customer requirements is crucial for successful product design. However, traditional methods for requirement classification, such as Kano models based on questionnaires, can be time-consuming and may not capture all requirements accurately. Analyzing large volumes of user reviews using simple natural language processing techniques can also result in accuracy issues. To address these challenges, we propose a framework that combines pre-trained models (PTMs), Kano models, and the sentiment analysis technique. Our approach integrates an LDA-K-Means model enhanced by PTM ERNIE for pinpointing product feature topics within user reviews. Then, a sentiment analysis is performed using the fine-tuned PTM SKEP to assess user satisfaction with features. Finally, the Kano model is applied to perform requirement classification. We evaluate our framework quantitatively, demonstrating its superior performance compared to the baseline models. Our sentiment analysis model also outperforms the other baseline models. Moreover, a case study on smartphones illustrates the effectiveness of our framework. This research results suggest that leveraging a suitable PTM can better address the problem of requirement classification in user review analyses, leading to improved product design.

e-Resources in the university library as learning resources are one of the primary services that promote learning and research to improve university productivity. At present, users find it difficult to access e-resources and require assistance in finding them. When using the system, users felt frustrated, confused, and lost. The e-resources services system on library websites, on the other hand, lacks sociability and a sense of human warmth. Sociability and a sense of human warmth can be integrated into the website interface, which may evoke the sensation of being with an actual individual, even if the service is provided online. This study investigated the social presence aspects that can be implemented in the library's e-resources system. The purpose of this study is to elicit social presence features that can be implemented in the design of e-resource interfaces on library websites. The methods used in this study are in three phases: a) web content analysis from twelve university library interfaces designed in several countries; b) interviews with library staff; and c) assessment by a questionnaire of library website users. Website content analysis was used to investigate elements that offer many unique features to support the implementation of social presence through the e-resources interface. An interview was used to validate elements that were found in the web content analysis, and a questionnaire phase was used to assess the user requirements for these social presence elements. The results of empirical studies show that users need some elements of social presence, such as comments, chat, ratings, voice, personalized welcome in library accounts, tools, preference language, links for reference managers, and social media, as well as ease of access such as readable help font, color, and font size.

Requirements specification is a crucial stage in many software development life cycles. As requirements specifications evolve, they often become more complex. The development of methods to assist the comprehension and maintenance of requirements specifications has gained much attention in the past 20 years. However, there is much room for improvement for model-based specifications. The Use Case Maps (UCM) language, part of the ITU-T Z.151 User Requirements Notation standard, is a visual modeling notation that aims to describe requirements at a high level of abstraction. A UCM specification is used to integrate and capture both functional aspects (based on causal scenarios representing behavior) and architectural aspects (actors and system components responsible for scenario activities). As UCM models evolve and grow, they rapidly become hard to understand and to maintain. In this paper, we propose a static slicing technique to enhance the comprehension of UCM models. The developed slicing approach is implemented within the jUCMNav tool. We validate the proposed approach using a mock system and three publicly available UCM specifications. The results suggest that, on average, the models can be reduced by about 70% through slicing without losing information required for comprehension and maintenance activities. A small experiment involving 9 participants also suggests that the understandability of UCM specifications and comprehension speed have both improved substantially by using jUCMNav’s new slicing feature.