After 1980's, with rapid change of environment for product development in company, tight competition between conpanies, rapid growth of new innovative techniques and short product lifecycle have made product development term much shorter. And studies on usability become more important because of the maturities of consumer market and changes of viewpoint for user.
The concept of 'User-Centered Design', which locates users at the center of design team work, has been developed in 1980's to deal with rapidly changing environment of product. User-participatory approaches have the similarity that they can be achievedfrom the continuous observation on various reactions of the user at using products.
The purpose of this study is to investigate Virtual Rapid Prototype technology in order to apply it into User-Centered Design, and to introduce the concept of User-Centered Design to the product development process with the Virtual Rapid Prototype technology and its application.
This study analyzes quantitative and qualitative factors for user-centered design, in order to prepare the scientific background, and finds the solution for problems in application of Virtual Rapid Prototype to design process and for abstraction of the usability data.
For this, this study investigate the program 'RAPID', which is the product of 'Emultec. Inc', on the point of design application.
Finally, this study generates a real product with virtual rapid prototype to abstract the usability data which contains the quantitative and qualitative properties and verifies the conclusions of the research.
