November 1, 2015 was the official starting date of the SNF-funded research project “Don’t Guess, Simulate! Understanding User Preferences for Cloud Services”.

The SNF project builds on findings from Andrea Giessmann’s dissertation and aims at improving our understanding of user preferences for cloud services in order to support their user-oriented design. More precisely, we aim to develop and validate a systematic approach for eliciting and analysing customer preferences for cloud services and simulating market reaction to variations in cloud service design. Our approach builds on adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis, which is a marketing research technique to analyze multi-dimensional user preferences. In the context of cloud services, it allows to measure the trade-offs between the functional and non-functional properties as well as economic and vendor-related aspects. The results of our research will comprise (1) a method component supporting requirements engineering for cloud services; and (2) two empirical studies of consumer preferences for two distinct types of cloud services.

If you are interested in knowing more about the project, please contact Dana Naous (dana.naous@unil.ch) or Prof. Christine Legner (christine.legner@unil.ch).