Högskolan i Skövde

The aim of this paper is to highlight some benefits of incorporating usability/user experience (UX) approaches in the software development process of research projects advancing digital human modeling (DHM), and how these processes, approaches, and methods can help keeping the development process more focused and efficient. Research projects that contain large software development components may receive funding only to complete the core tasks, and including additional persons in a project may seem like a waste of resources. This paper introduces user research that relied on a UX approach called contextual inquiry to ascertain user goals and how those might be translated into features for DHM named IMMA that has been developed as a part of numerous research projects in the last decade. The goal of the study is to support DHM development in general through highlighting methods and approaches that can be used, with specific results aimed to support the continued development of IMMA. Results clearly show that existing functions do not support the goals of the user group examined, and highlights the need of understanding user goals and creating functions to support achieving those goals, rather than assuming what functionalities might be needed. By understanding user goals, interpreting those into activities and functionalities time and resources can be used more effectively, which is important for small to medium research projects, where both time and budget may be limited.