Assembly Instructions with AR: Towards measuring Interactive Assistance Experience in an Industry 4.0 Context

Current developments in digitized industrial manufacturing lead to work processes that are highly complex, frequently change and thus increase workload of staff. In this respect, assistive technologies have the potential to aid workers in better coping with increasing workload and requirements and consequently, maintaining good working experience(s). However, existing research on interactive assistive technologies has hitherto largely neglected work experience as a measurable construct. We addressed this shortcoming by conducting a subjective study that assesses different work experience dimensions in the context of interactive augmented reality assembly instructions, in a realistic industrial setting, with a decent sample size (N=48). In this study, we assessed work experience along the dimensions of perceived utility, hedonic user experience, and satisfaction with the assistive technologies used. On behalf of this approach we were able to detect a significant effect between perceived utility and satisfaction. In addition, we summarize lessons learned from this study as well as resulting implications and discuss open challenges for a research agenda on work experience in industry 4.0 contexts.

I. Introduction

Current trends in industrial manufacturing such as the increasing demand for customized products (small lot sizes) together with the automation of repetitive tasks will lead to increasingly complex and sophisticated tasks for the human workforce. In this context, augmented reality (AR) is considered to be a key technology that will support the worker in its daily work routines and thereby improve work experience. The field of work experience (WoX) investigates User-Experience (UX) and Quality-of-Experience (QoE) aspects of workers’ experiences with technological artefacts in their daily work routines (cf. [1]). Despite this potential for improving work experience, existing scientific literature concentrates mainly on workload related measures as the NASA TLX questionnaire and objective work measures as reported in [2]–[5]. Thereby, it falls short in identifying the potential work experience improvements through the use of AR technologies.