Abstract
Design evaluation is a critical stage in new product development. The main purpose is to revise product designs according to the evaluation result, thus satisfying customer requirements. Traditional design evaluation is usually conducted on real product prototypes, which involves high development costs and lengthy development time. As information technologies progressing, virtual prototyping technologies have recently becomes mature and been applied to design evaluation of various products and services. A design evaluation task needs to be studied from multiple perspectives . It is thus advantageous to understand if and what differences exist in design evaluations based on real and virtual prototypes, especially in the user experience arising during the evaluation process. Detailed studies are still lacking in previous works. Therefore, this research compares the differences between real and virtual prototypes by conducting a series of cognition experiments. In the first part of the experiments, we look into the evaluation correctness on identifying engineering attributes, usability, and product appearances, respectively, between the two means. Another focus is to examine the user experiences in the corresponding evaluation tasks. In the second part, we try to understand how the feedback information of different degrees influences the user experience in evaluating virtual prototypes. The experimental results show that the evaluation correctness based on virtual prototypes is lower than that of real ones in most tasks, and the user experience is worse. Moreover, adding sound or movement feedback in virtual prototypes improves the user experience in the evaluation task based on virtual prototypes, and the more feedback information, the closer to that produced by real prototypes. This work systematically investigates design evaluations based on real and virtual prototypes. The research findings provide good guidelines for improving virtual prototyping technologies.