A Prototyping Framework for Human-Centered Product Design: Preliminary Validation Study

Prototyping is a crucial aspect of the product design and development process. Successful development and deployment of products hinge on building correct prototypes. However, current prototyping frameworks often do not provide specific prototyping guidelines that are practical and readily applicable and do not consider Human Factors Engineering (HFE) design guidelines thoroughly. This paper presents a novel prototyping framework that integrates prototyping and HFE guidelines to address the research gap in the prototyping literature. The prototyping framework presents a database in the form of a graphical user interface (GUI), which contains userform data entry. The GUI userform helps the designer to develop prototyping strategies based on the prototyping best practices and HFE principles. Further, the GUI userform suggests tools and technologies that can be used to fabricate the prototype. Thus, the framework helps designers plan prototyping activities and reduces the reliance on intuition when fabricating prototypes. This paper also presents a preliminary validation study that focuses on exploring whether there is a statistical difference between the intervention and control group in developing prototyping strategies for various prototyping problems. The intervention and control group are tested using twelve prototyping problems, and the Prototyping Success score is measured for each group. An independent sample t-test is performed. From the statistical analysis, it can be inferred that the participants who use the prototyping framework produce mean Prototyping Success scores that are higher than that of the control group.