The inhabitants' participation in their houses' design process is critical for the customization of houses to their needs and aspirations and, thus, their satisfaction. The provision of mass-housing customization can be addressed using digital technologies, as they offer the generation of a wide range of solutions that can respond to the inhabitants’ needs. However, computational systems must be easy-to-use by non-specialists. The available literature shows that, although there are some systems allowing house co-design, existing interfaces were not developed with a focus on the user experience nor tested with potential users. This paper reports ongoing Ph.D. work that aims to define and evaluate a graphical user interface of a co-design tool for mass-housing customization. Interviews with potential users were conducted, and user requirements were extracted. We defined a framework of co-design tasks and designed a graphical user interface for our system, which was then evaluated by a panel of end-users, with a low-fidelity prototype version. Results of the evaluation show that the participants were satisfied with the design. Participants proposed also various enhancements to our design.

This work was supported by National Funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT), through the grant SFRH/BD/146044/2019, and under the ISTAR projects: UIDB/04466/2020 and UIDP/04466/2020.

Graphical user interface,Co-design of houses,Usability,User-centered design,User experience