Investigation on the Library Robot “Alice” in an enterprise Lin Yuan

The purpose of the report The purpose of the report is to 1) investigate the practical requirements and customers’ acceptance in a real enterprise 2) evaluate the basic functionality and practicability of our designed product “Alice” in practice

The Background of the Enterprise Name: Educational Science Publishing House Location: Beijing, China Employment: More than 300 employees. It publishes more than 1,000 kinds of books per year. It has an interior library.

Scope and method For the first purpose, we conducted a questionnaire asking 30 employees of the company to participate. For the second purpose, we conducted a focus group (unstructured interview) with one library manager and IT technician from the company. (3 respondents)

Questionnaire The purpose of the questionnaire is to investigate: customers’ requirements, customers’ behaviors and customers’ acceptance. We classify the questions of the questionnaire into the above categories, as seen in Table 1 Customers’ Requirements Customers’ Behaviors Customers’ Acceptance Question ID Q9, Q11, Q12, Q17, Q18, Q21 Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, Q5, Q6, Q7, Q8, Q10, Q13, Q14, Q15, Q16 Q11, Q19, Q20 Table 1 Questions distributions

Questionnaire We used descriptive statistics to analyze the questionnaire. Q19. Are you interesting in the library Robot? From the figure, we could see that library robot has a potential market and is accepted by most customers or users.

Focus Group – Evaluate the idea Seven components (seven C's) (Phillips, 2011) contribute to innovation success: choice/control, convenience, community, completeness, compatibility, coolness/communication and customer's cost. Table 2 the summarization of idea evaluation results

Focus Group – Evaluate the idea Figure 1 Vote percentage of the Library Robot “Alice”

Focus Group – Evaluate basic functionality Table 2 Satisfactory level for 6 basic functions of “Alice”

Focus Group – Evaluate basic functionality Figure 2 Satisfactory level distributions

Findings Useful findings Accuracy is the primary concern, not only for constructing a search engine, but for creating a librarian robot. Speed is the second factor that should be concerned during the project development process. Furthermore, the third key factor should be noticed is whether the product is easy to use. Popularity is a useful factor for marketing promotion; sometimes it is more useful than completeness or more functions. If a system has chatting functions, it should notice that the Logic of AI robot for automatic chatting is very important. Before designing the system, the logic should be pre-defined very well or could be easily improved in the future revision.

Findings The superiorities of our design The novelty of our design is guaranteed and accepted by most users in the enterprise. Functions are enough to satisfy most requirements presented by customers or users. From brief introduction, most users accept our product, and thin it is easy to use to some extent. Generability, Scalability and Compatibility are well handled in the proposed design.

Findings The deficiencies of our design Without prototype, speech cannot demonstrate anything to the customers. For those who are not IT experts, the robot seems not to easy to use. The computational cost, memory usage, network workload, and economic expense has been discussed in details in both discussion and presentation. Those are the most important factor that customers care about. Security issues have not been solved very well. Integration issues have not been proposed in the presentation.

Thank you!