Design of a human factors questionnaire to evaluate digital solutions developed for industrial work

Abstract

Industrial work is changing due to the fourth industrial revolution (Kagermann, 2013). The work will become more mediated when new technologies emerge in factories (e.g., robotics, artificial intelligence and augmented reality). During this change, it is important to consider human factors (HF) issues holistically when developing and implementing novel digital solutions. Often, HF methods such as questionnaires are focusing on a certain topic related to the development of the solution (e.g., usability, acceptance). However, in industrial work context, there are many different HF issues that should be considered when designing a human-technology interaction. To address this lack of a quick and holistic questionnaire, a WorkerFeedback questionnaire was developed through a Design and Evaluation Framework (Kaasinen et al., 2018), literature review and expert validation. The questionnaire development was based on the Design and Evaluation Framework, which supports design and evaluation of digital solutions that will be used by future factory workers (Kaasinen et al., 2018). The framework is useful for providing an overview to important user experience related issues and it is a holistic approach to design and evaluation tasks. The literature review was based on the HF topics that are related to the success of implementing new technology on to the factory floor. Several questionnaires were reviewed related to following topics: user experience, usability, user acceptance, usefulness, ergonomics, safety and ethics. Questionnaires were used as a basis to generate a 14-item questionnaire – two questions for each topic. The questionnaire was validated by an expert panel, which included three human factors experts with over 15 years of experience of user studies, mainly in industrial contexts. They were asked to review, for example, the adequacy of the topics and the formulation of the questions.The expert panel agreed that their overall impression of the questionnaire was good. The suggested seven topics were seen to be relevant for the context. Majority of the feedback was related to the formulation of the questions and making them easier to understand. Based on the experts’ feedback, the questions were shaped to their final form. In future, the WorkerFeedback questionnaire will be piloted with the actual digital solution users. The WorkerFeedback questionnaire was developed to smoothen the digital transition in industry and to support human-technology interaction design. The questionnaire can be used by HF experts as well as practitioners who want to get a holistic overview of developed digital solutions or solutions under development for work context.

Keywords: human factors, questionnaire, industrial work

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1001992