Analysis of the impact of user interaction on prototyping productivity during product development

Abstract

User involvement has been widely supported by both researchers and management as a critical factor in new product design (Cooper and Kleinshmidt, 1990; Foxall and Johnston 1987; Kanter, 1988; Parkinson, 1982; Rothwell et al., 1974; von Hippel, 1988). However, because of the time consuming and costly nature of user involvement, there has been studies that try to show at what stage of product development user involvement is critical or has the most influence on performance. By examining time sheet data reported by professional student teams from a graduate level product design course, we found that emphasis on user involvement during the early stages of development actually has no correlation to the total amount of time a team had spent during their product development process. We also found that brainstorming promotes teams to spend more time during prototyping stages and that when teams are constrained in time, they spend less on prototyping and put more emphasis on user interaction.