Explanatory Statement

Our Mission

Project Title: DEXTER - Decision-support system for expansion in retail stores
​​​​​​​Project ID: 31831

You are invited to take part in this usability study to gather feedback on the usability and efficiency of the Decision-support system for expansion in retail stores (DEXTER).

DEXTER has been developed as a part of a Masters of Philosophy degree being completed by Himanshu Pahuja at Monash University. Himanshu Pahuja was a full time employee of Specsavers up until 28th Feb 2022.

Please read this Explanatory Statement in full before deciding whether or not to participate in this research. If you would like further information regarding any aspect of this project, you are encouraged to contact the researchers via the phone numbers or email addresses listed in the Team page.

What is DEXTER ?

DEXTER is a Decision-support system for expansion in retail stores. The system is backed by series of data engineering and learning algorithms to deduce key factors that contribute towards the decision to expand a retail store.This is presented through visualisations that provide various trends and forecasts on the key factors thereby providing the user with facts supporting the decision to expand or justify the reasons to not expand. This project is focused on conducting a Usability Study to assess the effectiveness and completeness of DEXTER by asking the participants to complete a set of tasks using DEXTER and complete a post study system usability questionnaire.

Who can access DEXTER ?

DEXTER is a decision-support system backed by data engineering and analytics to power business intelligence visualisations. This system can be configured to connect any organisation's dataset and generate meaningful insights to help the decision making process for retail store expansions. The data engineering code and the visualisations are available through published research material.

What does this research involve?

This Usability study involves gathering feedback on the usability and efficiency of the Decision-support system for expansion in retail stores (DEXTER). The participants will be various business professionals with expertise in the domain of business development, and have been in one way or the other associated with the decision making process of expansion in retail stores. The participants will be presented with a set of tasks to complete using DEXTER and complete a follow up Usability questionnaire using google forms. The responses will be captured through google forms and saved in google drive hosted through Monash University. The responses will be shared with participants on completion and stored as per Monash University data storage guidelines.

What is expected from the participants?

Participation in the research involves completing a series of tasks on the decision support system named Dexter. Please refer to the tasks document for further details. Before starting the experiment, you will need to fill in a base-line questionnaire. On completion, you will need to fill in a usability test questionnaire to provide feedback on your experience with the system focusing on its effectiveness in helping the decision-making process.

• For each participant, all tasks and survey responses can take up to 30 minutes.

Why were you chosen for this research?

We are looking for professionals who actively use operational datasets for various purposes and understand the decision making process around retail store expansions. This will allow the research team to gauge the effectiveness of the provided dashboards.

Consenting to Participate in the project and withdrawing from the research

To consent to participate in this study, please fill in the consent form and the research team will get in touch with you to conduct the Usability study. The study involves using DEXTER to complete a set of tasks and complete a Usability questionnaire along with a demographics survey. If you do not wish to participate, you are under no obligation to do so, and can withdraw now. Your participation if you consent initially consists of completing the tasks defined above. All sessions will be held over Teams and recorded for observation of eye movements, focus span, hot and cold areas in the UI and efficiency of tasks completed. These measures will allow us to further improve the user interface and the user experience.

Possible Benefits and Risks to participants

The benefits of this research will be realised in better selection of stores for expansion, thereby providing business professionals and retail store owners with better confidence in the benefits of expansion. The decision support system will provide recommendations that are backed by real data and not based on opinions or preferences.

• Benefits - There are no financial benefits associated with this study. The study provides an evaluation of DEXTER which can be used to improve the decision making process for retail store expansions. The outcome of this project does not lead to financial benefits for the organisation. The outcomes only support the decision making process with improved business intelligence analytics.

• Recruitment Coercion - The recruitment of participants for this Usability study will be conducted by Mr Julian McAll (at Specsavers, Head of Technical Services). Julian will send out a blanket email to Specsavers staff. The interested participants can fill up the consent form to take part in the study and provide feedback. All informatory material such as explanatory statement, consent forms, demographic forms and usability questionnaire is hosted through google sites and google forms managed by Monash University.

• Privacy - All forms and responses are secured through Monash University’s google forms service. The results of the survey will be published as aggregated summaries and cannot be used to identify the participants in any way.

• Confidentiality - The dataset collected falls under Sensitive classification as per the Monash University data classification and storage policy. We will use raw data for our analysis and only the aggregated results will be available through my MPhil thesis from Monash Library or published materials. All participants will receive a copy of their responses recorded over email, if they wish to access. The results in aggregated form will be published and saved as per data storage policy outlined below.

• Data Storage Security - All forms and responses are securely stored through google forms service provided by Monash University. The retention and archival policy is as per Data Storage policy PROS 16/07 - 3.3.2 . (PROS 16/07 - 3.3.2 , Data and datasets created as part of research activities within Monash University, which are of regulatory or community significance.)

Confidentiality and Storage of Data

Collection of post study system usability questionnaire is the sole focus of this project. We aim to gather feedback on the decision support system. This dataset will be collected through google forms hosted within Monash University's google environment and saved in google drive for further analysis. The dataset will be stored and archived as per classification level Sensitive and retained as per PROS 16/07 - 3.3.2 of University guidelines.

Results

The result will be available in an academic thesis and conference. If you would like a copy of the final results, please contact the investigators listed on the Team page.

Complaints

Should you have any concerns or complaints about the conduct of the project, you are welcome to contact the Executive Officer, Monash University Human Research Ethics (MUHREC):

Executive Officer
Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC)
Room 111, Building 3e
Research Office
Monash University VIC 3800
Tel: +61 3 9905 2052 Email: muhrec@monash.edu Fax: +61 3 9905 3831