Improving design engineers’ performance through novelly structured design guidelines: a study in and with industry

Engineering design guidelines are a means of sharing knowledge and information explicitly. Past work points out that the structure of a design guideline is key to improve its usefulness, but that there is still a lack of a uniform specification. This paper presents a mobile eye tracking study with sixteen practitioners from industry and investigates how novelly structured design guidelines, which aim to support the embodiment design of screw joints, impact design engineers’ performance. A baseline group with access to a former design guideline and a follow-up group with access to a novel design guideline structure were compared. Results show that design engineers’ performance during embodiment design was improved through access to the novel structure, compared to the performance of those participants with access to the former design guideline structure. The novel structure allowed design engineers to spend less time on the design guideline, while achieving significantly better designs at the same time.