A user-centered design approach to personalization
Communications of the ACM
User Centered System Design; New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction
User Centered System Design; New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction
Sketch-based rapid prototyping platform for hardware-software integrated interactive products
CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
“Personal Practically Panoramic” Multimodal Interfaces
VR '06 Proceedings of the IEEE conference on Virtual Reality
Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Product design review application based on a vision-sound-haptic interface
HAID'10 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Haptic and audio interaction design
Designing Sound
Displays: Fundamentals and Applications
Displays: Fundamentals and Applications
Design by customer: concept and applications
Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing
Augmented reality-based design customization of footwear for children
Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing
Perceived feature utility-based product family design: a mobile phone case study
Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing
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The need for companies to improve their competitiveness may lead to innovation and the reconceptualization of traditional products and processes, with companies making an effort to enhance product elements related to functionality, attractiveness, technology and sustainability, and implementing mass-customisation concepts. Mass-customised products are developed to satisfy specific customer needs, in line with increasing demand for product variety and customisation. The analysis of what customers really want, capturing the Voice of the Customer (VOC), is one of the strategies used to establish effective product development processes. Using a VOC survey, it is possible to transform customer needs into the functional and psychological requirements of the product. This paper presents a methodology based on Virtual Reality (VR) technologies to support the capturing of the VOC in regard to the visual, haptic and auditory characteristics of products. This method can be applied to the beginning of the product development process, to allow companies to deduce from the data the requirements of new industrial customised products. A flexible and interactive Virtual Prototype (VP) of a product category is then developed as a product platform in a draft version by designers and configured according to customer needs, using an immersive VR environment. This method, based on the use of VP, reduces the number of physical prototypes that need to be manufactured during the product development process, thus reducing overall costs. In addition, the VP based method supports the mass-customisation process of products through the real-time integration and collection of data for product configuration preferences, involving as many users as possible representative of the target users of the new products. To demonstrate this process a case study concerning the development of the VP for a washing machine, a summary of test sessions with users and results are presented. Specifically, the results presented in this paper are related to improvements in capturing the VOC and reductions in Virtual Prototyping cost and time.