The overall objectives of the study were to choose, develop and experiment with some evaluation methods applicable to product design and capable of facilitating ergonomics-related decision-making. User participation was to be an essential part of the experimental evaluations. The study results, i.e. the EEE procedures, were to be guidelines for developing activities related to the design process at workplaces and by product manufacturers.
The specific objectives of this study were:
to choose, combine and apply the product evaluation methods already described in the literature for specific product evaluation purposes, especially those of obvious use in gerontechnology,
to find out how the characteristics, needs and opinions of end-users can be incorporated into the design process by the designer based on his/her experiences with the elderly,
to find out which methods are relevant at the different phases of design,
to investigate if the methods have enough potential to yield statistically significant, consistent and valid results to guide the design stage,
to find out feasible procedures to enable designs to be evaluated systematically within the context of strict budgets, limited time and participative trials with end-users (i.e., Experimental ergonomic evaluations as rivals of heuristic methods),
to give some examples of evaluative results, e.g., rank and rate single criteria or properties, especially ergonomic ones, of various technologies, such as products often related to gerontechnology and/or ICT.
The procedures were to be suitable to different contexts of product evaluation. The products were intentionally both traditional and ones related to state-of-the-art ICT, both purely Finnish (steps to sauna benches) and fully global (phone). The products were chosen to represent the wide variety of products to which the procedures can be applied. The original papers and the methods used in each were already presented in Fig. 6.