Critique of the Study

In general, observation and a survey afterwards was an effective method for gaining information of users’ experiences, and participants were willing to share their perceptions, needs, and desires with regard to the toolkit. This method is mentioned by Redmond and Moore (1995), who stated that it is an appropriate and popular way to gain insight about the UI and needs and opinions of users with regard to it. Furthermore, since people’s actions may be different from what they say in real situations, observation was also needed to achieve a more comprehensive view of the UI (Sainio et al. 2006).

One of the potential limitations of the study was that the participants were not necessarily intending to buy a MC lampshade. It is about how much they explore the interface and explore the elements of the website, and the depth of the participants’ comments, which can be influenced by their intention. Therefore, a participant in the study may not be motivated enough to experience all the elements of the toolkit. In this case, their low level of comments may not mean that all the elements have been implemented on the UI correctly. However, in order to improve the study, and encourage the participants to take the tasks more seriously, they were put into a draw and given the chance to win their lampshade at the end. This did not only act as an incentive compensating them for their time and effort, but also encouraged them to explore more and examine different options/features. However, this also may have limited their creativity and caused them to create something more functional without considering aesthetical aspects. This incentive, however, is more likely to have improved their exploration of the system overall.

8.7 Summary

Apart from the important findings obtained, this study, in general, illustrated how challenging user involvement can be in the design of a product, and also specifically for an AM-enabled MC toolkit.

The created toolkit allowed users to experience MC activity by directly manipulating design parameters. This interaction led to a more appreciated product in terms of the personalisation experience and increased product value. To create the prototype for the study, an experiment was conducted, which involved two CAD software programs (SolidWorks API, and Grasshopper) and two 3D-enabling libraries (Three.js and Processing). The experiment indicated the specifications for the CAD program or 3D-enabling library that should be used to create an MC toolkit, and the most suitable option was Three.js. Therefore, it is suggested for future AM-enabled toolkits, 3D-enabling libraries, specifically Three.js, are utilised due to having greater advantages (such as web-based capability) and more importantly an integrated

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feature ability. As mentioned previously, current examples of AM-enabled web-based 3D modelling toolkits (e.g. shapeshifter.io and Platypus) have also used Three.js, which verifies the outcome of this experiment. These findings helped to satisfy research objective 1.

Through this study, it can be concluded that the lampshade MC toolkit had contents and a layout (based on the first study and workshop) that were relatively easy for users to understand, and it was found to be satisfactory for the participants. However, there is a risk that the user may not understand all the options/features well, and he/she would need more guidance on some topics, e.g. physics providence, control points, etc. This finding helped to satisfy research objective 2.

The use of observation and a structured way of presenting issues in the survey for the study enabled the researcher to identify a broad range of problematic issues. More specifically, the study led to the following conclusions:

• The most important issue was guidance on control points. After that, the next most problematic issues concerning usability were explanation of titles, lack of design tools, wrong/unclear titles and hovering or pop-out information. While most of the comments were related to usability, they were mainly related to guidance, and achieving a high SUS score of 76 out of 100 showed that the first study and workshop had helped to improve usability of the toolkit. Therefore, the guidelines from the first study and workshop were included in the final framework design. Furthermore, the issues raised by participants also need to be addressed in the framework and therefore in the future improvement of the toolkits. These findings help to satisfy research objective 3.

• The data analysis enabled identification of the negative impacts of issues regarding users’ experience of the toolkit. These impacts affected the participants and the system under the three themes of guidance, arrangement, and usability. The most affected theme to emerge from the data analysis was the usability.

• The analysis of the results suggested that the impacts on the UXs of the toolkit are not caused by isolated issues alone, but by a combination of issues. For example, a lack of explanation on the titles led to having less information about the control points. Having no guidance on control points led to complaints about the title of each parameter. This means the customisation experience was affected by the issues mentioned previously and the combination of issues, with each issue having an effect on the others. Therefore, improving one aspect of the toolkit may have a knock-on positive effect on other aspects.

In addition, one more important aspect of the toolkit that needs careful consideration is DoF, which is a very intriguing topic because currently it is still

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not known how many options will satisfy a customer for a specific product toolkit. Therefore, what was learned in this study was that customers could be provided with two or more versions of the toolkits with different numbers of DoF. Another option can be to add a button called ‘more options’ to the interface and, as customers click on it, more options are revealed (Makies 2016). These findings helped to satisfy research objective 4. Further investigation into this topic is needed but is outside the scope of this research due to time and resource limitations. The following chapter will deal with creating a design framework for MC toolkits based on all the findings that have been reached, together with other available published guidelines from other researchers.

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Chapter 9 : Development of a Design Framework for User-centred