Abstract
When users are confronted with the use of a tool, they develop a mental model of how the product should function.
The usability of products can be improved by incorporating features that are beneficial in the context of use to aid the
user in completing the task. This paper reports series of studies that explores the concept of users experience as a
concept for exploring product design. An alarm clock was chosen to explore the concept in the study. Thirty six
participants were recruited in study 1 and they were provided with structured questionnaire to complete. This was
done in order to obtain deep insights into the user’s need. The identified needs from the structured questionnaire
were collated and thereafter converted to engineering characteristics. These were later presented to another set of
twenty five participants recruited to rank their importance in study 2. The ranking were averaged using the
normalized weighting approach. At the end of the second study, a new prototype of the alarm clock was designed
based on the five most important characteristics identified in the study. Finally, the alarm clock develop was
compared with the conventional alarm clock available in the market using twenty participants recruited for study 3.
The result shows the alarm clock developed from the study show significant performance rating compare to the
conventional available in the market by the majority of the participants recruited in the study.
KEYWORDS: User experience, Product design, Users need, Engineering characteristics, Normalised weighting
approach