The following papers introduce and characterize the nature of Soft Reliability, highlight the relevance of the problem, and outline possible solutions to tackle the challenges.

• Brombacher, A.C.; Sander, P.C.; Sonnemans, P.J.M.; Rouvroye, J.L. Managing Product Reliability in Business Processes ‘Under Pressure’. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2005, 88 (2), pp. 137-146
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• Ouden, E.d.; Lu, Y.; Sonnemans, P.J.M.; Brombacher, A.C. Quality and Reliability Problems from a Consumer Perspective: An Increasing Problem Overlooked by Businesses? Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2006, 22 (7), pp. 821-838
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• Koca, A.; Funk, M.; Karapanos, E.; Rozinat, A.; Aalst, W.M.P.v.d.; Corporaal, H.; Martens, J.B.O.S.; Putten, P.H.A.v.d.; Weijters, A.J.M.M.; Brombacher, A.C. Soft Reliability: An Interdisciplinary Approach with a User-System Focus. Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 2008, 25 (1), pp. 3-20
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Diversity in user experience is one reason that expectations of customers are not met while products may be fully functioning. More information on this research can be found in the following publications and on http://www.ekarapanos.com.

• Karapanos E., Zimmerman J., Forlizzi J., Martens J.-B. User Experience Over Time: An Initial Framework. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI ‘09. ACM.
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• Karapanos, E.; Hassenzahl, M.; Martens, J.-B. User experience over time. CHI’08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. Florence, ACM.
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• Karapanos E., Martens J.-B., Hassenzahl M. Accounting for Diversity in Subjective Judgments. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI ‘09. ACM.
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• Karapanos, E.; Martens, J.-B. Characterizing the diversity in users’ perceptions. IN BARANAUSKAS, C. (Ed.) Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2007. Springer.
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• Karapanos, E.; Martens, J.-B. On the discrepancies between designers’ and users’ perceptions as antecedents of failures in motivating use. IN BLASHKI, K. (Ed.) International Conference Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction. Lisbon, IADIS, 2007
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An obvious measure of Soft Reliability problems in the field is the large and rapidly increasing share of reported user complaints that cannot be attributed to any violation of products’ technical specifications. Nonetheless, current operational quality analysis and evaluation methods are not user focused and hence such field reports cannot be utilized to improve the quality of products and processes. The following papers present how to model and implement Soft Reliability, based on user feedback, in New Product Development processes.

• Koca, A.; Brombacher, A.C.; Panchal, J.H.; Mistree, F. Engineering Soft Reliability in Product Realization. In Proceedings of the 21st ASME Design Theory and Methodology Conference, San Diego, USA, 2009, ASME DETC09/DTM-87261, ASME.
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• Koca, A.; Karapanos, E.; Brombacher, A.C. “Broken Expectations” from a Global Business Perspective. In Proceedings of CHI 2009 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Boston, USA, 2009, pp. 4267-4272, ACM.
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• Koca, A.; Brombacher, A.C. Extracting “Broken Expectations” from Call Center Records: Why and How. In Proceedings of CHI 2008 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Florence, Italy, 2008, pp. 2985-2990, ACM.
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• Koca, A.; Schouwenaar, A.J.M.; Brombacher, A.C. Field-Feedback in Innovative Product Development: A Comparison of Two Industrial Approaches. In Proceedings of the 14th International Product Development Management Conference, Porto, Portugal, 2007, pp. 657-668, EIASM.
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• Koca, A.; Schouwenaar, A.J.M.; Brombacher, A.C. Analysis of User-Centered Failure Mechanisms in New Product Development for Quality Improvement. In Proceedings of the 14th International Annual EurOMA Conference, Ankara, Turkey, 2007, EIASM.
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• Koca, A.; Brombacher, A.C. User-Centered Analysis of Feedback Operations for Quality Improvement in New Product Development. In Proceedings of the 15th International Annual EurOMA Conference, Groningen, The Netherlands, 2008, EIASM.
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• Koca, A.; Lu, Y.; Brombacher, A.C.; Hartmann, J.H. Towards Establishing Foundations for New Classes of Reliability Problems Concerning Strongly Innovative Products. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Management of Innovation and Technology, Singapore, 2006, pp. 581-584, IEEE.
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In our Soft Reliability project we develop an evaluation ecology that enables the anticipation of product use by gathering behavioral and attitudinal data early in the product development process. The following papers describe the overall framework and report on case studies where the framework has been applied.

* Koca, A.; Funk, M.; Karapanos, E.; Rozinat, A.; Gaarden, v.d. N. Grasping Product Pragmatics: A Case with Internet on TV. In Proceedings of uxTV 2008 International Conference on Designing Interactive User Experiences for TV and Video, Silicon Valley, California, USA, 2008, ACM.
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* Funk, M.; Rozinat, A.; Alves de Medeiros, A.K.; Putten, P.H.A. van der; Corporaal, H.; Aalst, W.M.P. van der. Improving Product Usage Monitoring and Analysis with Semantic Concepts. In Proceedings of 8th International Conference on Information Systems Technology and its Applications, Sydney, Australia, 2009. Best paper award.
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* Funk, M.; Rozinat. A.; Karapanos, E.; Alves de Medeiros, A.K.; Koca, A. In Situ Evaluation of Recommender Systems: Framework and Instrumentation. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Elsevier (first revision submitted, 2009).

More details on the technical architecture of the D’PUIS data collection framework can be found in the following papers.

• Funk, M., van der Putten, P.H.A., Corporaal, H. Specification for user modeling with self-observing systems. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interaction, 2008.
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• Funk, M., van der Putten, P.H.A., Corporaal, H. Model interpretation for executable observation specifications. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. Knowledge Systems Institute, 2008.
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• Funk, M., van der Putten, P.H.A., Corporaal, H. UML profile for modeling product observation. In Proceedings of the Forum on Specification and Design Languages, IEEE Computer Society, 2008.
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For data analysis we employ process mining techniques and we specifically exploit semantic annotations of the collected data. For related publications on process mining see the following papers and our website http://processmining.org.

• Aalst, W.M.P. van der; Dongen, B.F. van; Günther, C.W.; Mans, R.S.; Alves de Medeiros, A.K.; Rozinat, A.; Rubin, V.; Song, M.; Verbeek, H.M.W.; Weijters, A.J.M.M. ProM 4.0 : comprehensive support for real process analysis. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 4546, pp. 484-494, 2007
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• Alves de Medeiros, A.K.; Aalst, W.M.P. van der; Pedrinaci, C. Semantic Process Mining Tools: Core Building Blocks. In Proceedings of the 16th European Conference in Information Systems (ECIS), 2008
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