Mining Potential Requirements by Calculation of User Operations

This study proposes a method for mining potential user requirements from users’ nonverbal behaviors by analyzing their operational problems, since human behaviors reflect emotions and operational bottlenecks in human-machine interactions. Taking a single daily operation task as an example, three key steps were included in the method: first, modeling users’ operation and constructing the operation chain; second, finding emotional or physical problems in the operation chain, where the problems were defined mathematically as an emotional or physical load at each suboperation; and third, defining and obtaining potential user requirements by improving the operational problems when performing a task. Furthermore, a daily operation task was introduced to demonstrate and validate the method of mining user potential requirements. The results indicate that it is effective to discover the potential needs for a specific product and provide satisfactory solutions by calculating and optimizing operational problems.