Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) technologies gave rise to a multitude of new opportunities and challenges for creating human-machine-interfaces. Especially for mobile devices like tablets, tangible user interfaces (TUI), providing the haptic controls for manipulating the GUI, and in extension tangible human-machine interfaces (tHMI), also including hardware elements for handling and operating the computing device, are to be designed. Currently only rudimentary design guidelines exist and state-of-the-art engineering methods are not comprehensive enough to cover the elaborate design process. In this paper, we follow a design science based approach to develop and evaluate an engineering process for usable tHMI. We empirically evaluate the engineering process by creating a tHMI for a mobile assistance system for maintenance workers, focusing on the subjective quality measures for the created artifacts. Measuring electrical activity in involved muscles as an objective benchmark, we show that tHMIs created using our method are significantly better than current available commercial alternatives. The prototype resulting from our instantiation provides a basis for useable mobile devices in an industrial context and is evaluated as highly suitable for use by domain experts. Hence our engineering process is one of the first comprehensive approaches that covers all aspects of designing, building and evaluating tHMI for IoT devices in production settings and is supplemented with a choice of rigorous methods for evaluating usability in the field.
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Wächter, M., Hoffmann, H., Bullinger, A.C. (2019). Towards an Engineering Process to Design Usable Tangible Human-Machine Interfaces. In: Bagnara, S., Tartaglia, R., Albolino, S., Alexander, T., Fujita, Y. (eds) Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018). IEA 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 825. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96068-5_15
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