A Clinical Residency in Sausage Making

Abstract

Gaining the perspective of users is an essential goal of anyone performing human factors work in product design. Within medical product design teams, engineers have the frequent opportunity to interact with medical professionals. This embarrassment of riches in access to the user experience presents unique benefits and challenges to developing a usable product interface. This panel will provide insight into situations and perspectives of when human factors engineers work with medical device users (healthcare providers such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, biomedical engineers) who were also part of the product development teams. The scope will include: what interactions are involved to work effectively on a project team; what was expected compared to what actually happened; effectively providing recommendations for designing usable products; what user experience / use testing methodologies were learned and performed by someone outside of human factors; and best practices for team interactions.