The authors have been trying to introduce and penetrate UX design into RICOH Company by design support approach since February 2017. Through this activity, there have been many findings which would be so useful in many similar cases. For further investigation, we have interviewed 5 persons who received our support to analyze the problems frequently seen under some specific circumstances, as well as the causes and the solutions of the problems. We extracted 9 patterns and organized them by the Pattern Language method. We applied these patterns to the projects supported in 2018 and verified the usefulness of the patterns.

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Since voice-based user interfaces (VUIs) have now been adopted by smart phones and smart speakers, the number of opportunities for consumers to use these has increased. There are a wide range of situations in which VUI devices are used, such as in the home, office, car, and in public spaces; however, the target users of VUIs at the research stage were limited to seniors and disabled people, who found it difficult to use touch panels or keyboards. This paper focuses on VUI devices for consumers, and examines the usage patterns of VUI devices in everyday life. UX design strategies are proposed for VUI devices based on these data. Firstly, a questionnaire is conducted in order to collect user data, and 10 interviewees are then identified by focusing on the users who use VUI devices more than once per day. About five hours of interview data are used as a corpus, and this is analyzed using a qualitative approach. Finally, seven key findings are presented that can contribute to the development of further UX design strategies for VUI devices in consumers' daily life.

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This paper introduces a case study intended for verifying, evaluating and improving technologies for a practical service; its process is analyzed using the design thinking approach. We develop and evaluate two technologies for disaster situations; a resilient information sharing platform and a mutual safety confirmation application on the platform. The case study includes a variety of verifications and evaluations such as a system work test in a disturbed public space, a larger scale system work test, and user acceptance evaluations that address both usability and psychological factors. The heart of our improvement process is it repeated back-step in the service design process for more efficient incremental advancement. We advance the field of technology research and service design research by providing guidelines for technology improvement and/or service design through the introduction and analysis of the practical case study.

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The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of evaluating piano performance skill by using eye movement data while reading scores. It is assumed that the ideal score reading is represented as an in-tempo eye movements where all notes constituting a beat should be captured within central vision area. A normative model representing the ideal score reading by skilled piano players is derived by assuming that they should be able to perform it by adjusting τC and ξs where AIA (Area of Information Acquisition) is the area from which meaningful information of the musical score should be acquired and ξs is the width of AIA, and τC is the time necessary for acquiring the information from AIA. This paper proposes a method for categorizing learners in terms of the level of piano playing skill by examining deviations of these quantities from those of the normative model. Eye movement data while reading musical scores were obtained from 59 participants. They were classied in three groups by applying the proposed method. The validity of the groping was checked by their scores of the end semester examination.

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In this study, we measure and analyze viewer's gaze data when watching characters with subtitles, and reveal the differences in information secure by balloon captions and fixed subtitles quantitatively. Since the balloon caption is displayed in the vicinity of the speaker, the amount of movement of the line of sight is reduced more than the fixed subtitle, and it is presumed that the correspondence between the speaker and the subtitle is easy. In order to reveal these effectiveness, from the three viewpoints; fixation time ratio to total, time line of sight vertical movement distance per unit time(sec), total saccade angle with unit time. As a result, it was revealed that the balloon caption tends to have a smaller gaze moving distance of the viewer than the fixed subtitle, accompanying saccade tends to decrease.

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Living labs make it possible to create highly aligned service to the users real context of use. However, motivation of the users to participate in the process is not clear. We therefore conducted a field study to understand the meanings of participating in the living lab for the purpose to enhance the value of the living lab. Our study showed that users had derived diverse meanings from the dialogue in the living lab; the living lab enables participants to broaden their perspective, gain self-knowledge, as well as to serve other people to satisfy their need.

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Since UX is literally the "user experience", essentially only the user can know. In view of this, in the previous research, the authors constructed and tried out a mechanism to widely collect “worthy experiences”, that is, UX from the users themselves through the application on the smartphone. Based on the previous research, this paper reports that a design planning method based on user experience data is established and embodied as a support system. Furthermore, this paper shows that the applicability of this method to design practice is verified by experiments involving actual designers. From the results of the verification experiments, the characteristic effects that the design planning method proposed in this research brings to the process of idea creation for new products are evident as follows compared with the methods generally taken conventionally. That is, in the case of the conventional method, time is spent in the process of concept determination for imagining the social background and the characteristics of the target user and for making a consensus regarding it. However, by applying the proposed method, it is easy to make a consensus because concept decision is based on UX data, and the idea creation based on it becomes the center of the discussion. In addition, by being able to put out ideas while referring to UX data, the communication for idea creation is activated, and as a result, it is possible to create ideas that take into account details.

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Since autonomous vehicles are becoming to be mainstream of the traffic society in future, a larger degree of flexibility is provided for occupants in inside of vehicles and User Experience (UX) would be desirable more than ever. In order to explore for a way of providing new UX, we investigated that the height of viewpoints affect to psychology or cognitive states during moving, by two experiments using HMD. It was found that high viewpoints induce positive emotions and low viewpoints induce negative emotions. These findings contribute a new UX value for vehicle interiors.

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With the increasing diversification of mobile services, a more comprehensive understanding of users is required in order to provide a better user experience. This case study focuses on analysis of the information behavior that occurs when mobile phones are purchased. This behavior is the initial experience of users. The analysis is based on the results of qualitative investigations conducted in rural Myanmar. We expected to deepen our understanding of users’ behavior when they were considering bringing new information technology devices into their lives by investigating not only mobile phone users but also non-users, who have decreased in developed countries, as extreme users. From the results, we extracted the effect of context of information on users’ information behavior and discuss it from the perspective of consumer behavior research. The context of information characterizes the user’s information behavior and can be used as a resource to predict future interaction with products or services. The main contribution of this paper is to reveal the characteristics of information behavior in the initial stage of user experience and treat it as a practical resource that can provide new design opportunities in human interface research.

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An interview is one of the major knowledge elicitation methods in human factor studies, however it takes much time and effort in preparation, implementation, and data analysis. In order to solve this problem, a chat-based interviewer agent for cognitive task analysis employing critical decision method (CDM) was developed. This agent automatically generates questions for and response to the answers from the human interviewee, while manages entire process of the interview based on an interview guide incorporating CDM. The automated response generation process is based mainly on shallow intelligence and empirical interview techniques along with the interview guideline of cognitive task analysis. Test interviews with 48 subjects was conducted to evaluate the performance of the interviewer agent by comparing various aspects of the performance with a chat-based fully structured interview. The result showed that the proposed interviewer agent was superior to the fully structured interview in almost all aspects in the evaluation, which suggests its high potential to become an alternative to actual human-human interviews.

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