Increasing Human Factors Effectiveness in Product Design

Abstract

Human Factors specialists working alone or in small groups face a number of challenges when designing commercial products. These challenges range from having a role that is often poorly understood to a basic lack of staff resources. Strengthening the role of Human Factors specialists typically requires the allocation of already scarce resources and as a result individuals working alone or in small groups often face a breadth versus depth trade off. This is because activities such as user interface design and test and evaluation can be resource intensive to the exclusion of other tasks.

An alternate role for Human Factors specialists working in this type of environment is to focus on information as a critical resource and to leave design implementation to other, better staffed development groups. This change in emphasis allows the Human Factors specialist to focus on identifying user needs and testing to ensure that those needs are met.

Changing from a designer to an information provider requires skills in two areas: information gathering at the early phases of the product development cycle and usability testing at the design phase. Information gathering activities are used to identify critical user interface elements and to develop behavioural objectives for the product. Usability testing is used to provide ongoing feedback about the effectiveness of the design solution throughout the design phase of the project.

One key result of Human Factors specialists becoming more involved with defining user (customer) needs to the developers and verifying that the product design meets these needs is to shift the design focus from engineering driven to user centered.