User-Centered Design and Evaluation of a Workbench for Design Practitioners Using an Integrated SAPAD-AHP-VIKOR Approach

Abstract

Digital-creative work increasingly involves multiple digital tools, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and repeated transitions among information retrieval, digital drawing, device operation, model making, and design revision. Existing workbenches are mainly designed for general office use or traditional drawing scenarios and provide limited support for these interconnected activities. This study proposes an integrated SAPAD-AHP-VIKOR design process for a workbench for design practitioners. User observation and semi-structured interviews were conducted with design practitioners to construct a user journey and collect behavioral data. SAPAD was then used to establish behavior–product–meaning mappings and derive general meaning clusters. AHP was used to rank the identified needs, calculate criterion weights, and conduct consistency analysis. The resulting weights were incorporated into VIKOR to evaluate and rank three workbench alternatives, followed by a sensitivity analysis of criterion weights. Alternative 3 achieved the lowest Q value and remained the top-ranked alternative under the tested single-criterion and joint weight-perturbation scenarios. Based on this result, an integrated workbench for digital creation was developed by combining multi-posture screen adjustment, adaptive lighting, paper and 3D printing, height adjustment, accessory storage, and input-device organization. The results of this study indicate that the SAPAD-AHP-VIKOR integrated method can support design requirement extraction, requirement weight determination, and alternative scheme evaluation in this case study, providing a referable requirement analysis and design process for the early-stage design decisions of office products such as design workstations.