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Towards a more systematic analysis of uncertain user–product interactions in product development: an enhanced user–product interaction framework
Author(s) -
Lu Yuan,
den Ouden Elke,
Brombacher Aarnout,
Geudens Wim,
Hartmann Herman
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
quality and reliability engineering international
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.913
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1099-1638
pISSN - 0748-8017
DOI - 10.1002/qre.820
Subject(s) - product (mathematics) , new product development , product engineering , product design specification , reliability (semiconductor) , reliability engineering , computer science , product management , product lifecycle , process (computing) , product design , systems engineering , risk analysis (engineering) , engineering , business , marketing , power (physics) , physics , geometry , mathematics , quantum mechanics , operating system
For highly innovative products the actual product use is often very uncertain. However, the uncertainty/variability in product use and its impact on product reliability has rarely been explored. The mismatch between the anticipated product use and the actual product use can lead to considerable unexpected technical and non‐technical reliability risks. However, traditional reliability management techniques focus primarily on managing technical reliability risks. This situation results in an increasing amount of no‐fault‐found or fault‐not‐found reports in the highly innovative consumer electronics (CE) industry. Under the time‐to‐market pressure, it is increasingly important to take into consideration the significant factors that determine product use in the early product development process. In the Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) framework, a top‐down approach (operational profile) is used to analyse the product use. However, an operational profile cannot be directly applied to analyse product use for CE products due to the differences between the reliability of software products and that of CE products. This paper proposes an enhanced framework to structurally analyse unexpected user–product interactions for highly innovative CE products. In this framework, the product, user and environmental conditions are used to analyse user–product interactions. This framework has been implemented to analyse user–product interactions by using data from a consumer test of a highly innovative CE product. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.