From Task Analysis to Wireframe Design: An Approach to User-Centered Design of a GUI for Mobile HRI at Assembly Workplaces

While user-centered design philosophy and corresponding design recommendations are central pillars of human-robot interaction (HRI) research, the process how to move from such abstract and generalized design recommendations to concrete, context-specific design implementations remains under-researched and vague in the literature. The goal of this paper is therefore to show an approach for moving from abstract design recommendations to a concrete interface, and thus illustrates a design process that is rarely illustrated in concrete terms in HRI. This is done using a real-world use case of designing a possible user-centered interface for mobile cooperative manufacturing robots for assembly work in a medium-sized company. A study is presented to conceptualize and test a Research-through-Design approach, which combines transdisciplinary methods to determine relevant information which should be displayed on a graphical user interface (GUI) for HRI. Based on the use case, a Goal-Directed Task Analysis (GDTA) was conducted, consisting of a participatory observation and interviews with subject matter experts to analyze an assembly task from the work objective to the information units. The acquired information has been transferred to a physical model. A wireframe has been created to show how the results of the GDTA and the physical model can be applied to a GUI. The wireframe design has been evaluated through qualitative interviews with end users (n = 12) to get first estimates about its relevance. In order to validate the applied methods, design and engineering students (n = 10) repeated the process in stages followed by interviews. The results indicate that the method mix shows potential and leads to supportive user interfaces.