User Consideration in Early Stages of Product Development – Theories and Methods

Traditional design theories have focused on technical functions and more or less disregard a product’s user involvement. The existing methods of ergonomic design are mostly intended for analysis activities. There is a need for new dynamic methods that focus on user-product interactions. The aim of this research work is to develop design methods for user-product interactions, which should support synthesis activities in early product development phases. An observation study and a questionnaire survey were carried out in order to investigate product developers ’ work and relation to the users for providing background information about the research problem. Furthermore, student projects in product development were followed, giving essential input. After the theories and methods were developed, a retrospective interview study was carried out in order to confirm the need for the developed methods. The studies showed, for instance, that companies use few formal methods and almost none of these are directed towards th