Augmented Operators and Virtual User Manuals for Complex Industrial Systems: User Research and Scenario-Building Activities

Over the last decades, rapid technological advances are radically changing the manufacturing environment. Although the impact of Industry 4.0 intends to equip traditional factories with interconnected and reconfigurable machines to avoid errors and maximize production process efficiency, maintenance processes are still suffering from inconsistent and unstructured documentation. In this scenario, Augmented Reality (AR) appears as a promising tool to support the operators in real-time during manual operations by reducing human errors and dependence on printed work instructions. AR applications can enable maintenance operators to speed up production efficiency and reduce or prevent equipment downtime. Considering this, the paper presents a design research collaboration with an industrial company to convert the existing documentation into an accessible augmented interface. The activities adopted a human-centered design perspective to explore the influencing factors that can improve technological accessibility and acceptance of AR applications. User research and scenario-building activities will help the research to define proper guidelines to augment workers in complex maintenance operations.