About

Manufacturers of electronic products and systems are more and more confronted with complaints from both consumers and professionals that are not related to technical or functional failures, but to an unexpected mismatch between actual product use and intended use by the manufacturer.

Main causes of this mismatch are:

• Use of products/devices by people who do not understand the product/interface due to their different mental representation of that particular product; think of the role of culture, gender, age group and so on (the user perspective).
• User expectations about a product that do not match the possibilities that the product offers (that the manufacturer anticipated the user would expect).
• Unexpected use: a particular way of using a product that was not foreseen by the designer or manufacturer, and therefore not anticipated upon (the business perspective).
• The increasing complexity of product-systems (product + environment /connections + services).
• The reciprocity of the relation between product and user: the behaviour of the user is affected by the use of the product. In case of ambient intelligent products for example, the product adapts its behaviour as well (dynamic user-product interaction).