Evaluating user experience of early product concepts
Virpi Roto, Heli Rantavuo, Kaisa Väänänen · 2009
After conducting explorative user studies in the beginning of product development process, there are often more alternative product concepts than it is possible to develop further. The best ideas for production need to be selected by investigating the technical feasibility and profitability of each product concept, but also by evaluating attractiveness and value of the concept proposals for the target user group. This paper discusses means for and challenges in user experience evaluation in the early phases of product development, when only rough product concept descriptions exist. We investigate two lightweight evaluation methods in more detail: expert evaluation and remote online evaluation, and analyse how they could help in identifying the best concepts from the user experience perspective.