Towards a more systematic analysis of uncertain user-product interactions in product development: an enhanced user-product interaction framework

For highly innovative products the actual product use is often very uncertain. However, the uncertainty/variability in product use and its impact on product reliability has rarely been explored. The mismatch between the anticipated product use and the actual product use can lead to considerable unexpected technical and non-technical reliability risks. However, traditional reliability management techniques focus primarily on managing technical reliability risks. This situation results in an increasing amount of no-fault-found or fault-not-found reports in the highly innovative consumer electronics (CE) industry. Under the time-to-market pressure, it is increasingly important to take into consideration the significant factors that determine product use in the early product development process. In the Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) framework, a top-down approach (operational profile) is used to analyse the product use. However, an operational profile cannot be directly applied to analyse product use for CE products due to the differences between the reliability of software products and that of CE products. This paper proposes an enhanced framework to structurally analyse unexpected user-product interactions for highly innovative CE products. In this framework, the product, user and environmental conditions are used to analyse user-product interactions. This framework has been implemented to analyse user-product interactions by using data from a consumer test of a highly innovative CE product