Designing for Humans

Comfort in Using Hand Tools

2008-08-20T09:34:11-04:00

A recent dissertation out of Delft University (Netherlands), discusses Comfort in using hand tools: theory, design and evaluation. You can download the document as a PDF (note - cover page is in Dutch, but document is written in English).

Kuijt-Evers covers the state of the art in measuring ergonomic comfort for non-powered hand tools and conducted empirical research to validate a set of qualitative comfort predictor for use in design and evaluation.

Here's the abstract:

Everyone uses hand tools in their daily life, like knife and fork. Moreover, many people use hand tools in their profession as well as during leisure time. It is important that they can work with hand tools that provide comfort. Until now, the avoidance of discomfort was emphasized during the design process of hand tools, like screwdrivers, hand saws and paint brushes. In the near future, the focus will shift towards providing comfort. However, some questions need to be answered to make this shift, like: What does the end-user mean with comfort in using hand tools? How can we translate this into hand tool design and the design process? How can we evaluate hand tools on comfort? These questions are answered in the current thesis.

Service Design: A Model for Green Product Design

2008-08-13T11:50:08-04:00

While there's clearly a great deal of attention around "green design" these days, there's very little guidance on how to design such products (e.g. energy-saving, recyclable, super-efficient, etc.) from a user-centered perspective. One could argue that there's nothing unique about such products that a typical user-centered design approach would not already accommodate.

But an interview with Terry Swack, which is making the blog rounds, emphasizes the importance of considering the uniqueness of positioning sustainable products:

"...most consumers still don't see the environment as a problem. Marketers have to help them not only to understand the problem, but to actually care about it. It's a matter of making it personally relevant and that their actions matter. But even the greenest consumers don't use sustainability as their primary decision criteria. The green product has to work as well or better than as the other, and be priced relatively the same. Then they'll look at the green attributes."

In other words, a sustainable product not only needs to provide comparable cost, functionality and ease-of-use, but also has the added imperative of effectively communicating its value above and beyond traditional product alternatives.

How is one to accomplish that? Since we're talking about attributes that go beyond the user's short-term engagement with the core functionality of the product - like its impact on the environment - I believe it is most effective to take a service design, rather than a product design approach. In service design we are not only interested in the ease-of-use around the product, but the user's holistic awareness and experience.

In a service design analysisI conducted last year, I defined three key characteristics of a service experience:

Guidance - Information delivered to service consumers to learn about the
service, understand how to use and navigate the service, and to take
away for reference.
Comfort - Transitioning to physical, emotional and cognitive ease and
familiarity is necessary for services that take place in new contexts or
locations.
Sensation Excitement, surprise and other emotional factors can attract
interest and maintain engagement over the duration of the service.

While these characteristics were used in the context of a multi-dimensional user experience (i.e. attendance at a design conference), they can also be applied to a user's experience with a sustainable product:

Guidance - This refers to the educational component of the user experience. Increasing the user's awareness of the relative value of a sustainable product, as well as it's appropriate usage, is (at least for the short-term). Implicit and explicit guidance needs to be factored into the design.
Comfort - On one level, users need to be convinced that the sustainable aspects of a product will not compromise their experience in terms of mental demand, physical comfort or other comfort-related factors. At the other level, many users will feel a sense of satisfaction if they are sacrificing a degree of comfort in order to lessen environmental impact. The design challenge is balancing those two types of comfort across different types of users, and even within an individual's range of experiences with the product.
Sensation - Excitement can come in many forms, but perhaps none more tangible then the pairing of saving money while "saving the planet". Many, but not all sustainable products can provide comparable functionality at a competitive or reduced cost.

As with designing services, it's critical to mindfully combine these three characteristics. One example is home power monitoring applications. These interfaces provide explicit guidance via reporting energy usage for various appliances within the home, support comfort, quite literally, through effective temperature management, and deliver sensation through a combination of heightened user control and cost savings.

Upcoming Research Conference Programs

2008-08-07T16:29:25-04:00

A number of upcoming conferences have released their programs to help you decide whether to go and what to see when you get there:

The IDSA National Conference - Polar Opposites (Sept 10-13, Arizona) features a range of topics. For the design research crowd there's: People Can't Tell You What They Want and Nine Other Design Research Myths
Chris Rockwell, IDSA, founder and president, Lextant.

The line-up for the Design Research Conference (Sept 19-20, Chicago) looks pretty much completed, although the order of speakers has yet to be determined. Some of the workshops are already filled up.

The Human Factors & Ergonomics Society (Sept 22-26, New York) program is not easy to navigate (go figure). It's a very large conference so you can search by day or category, but there's no easy way to browse through all the sessions to see what's of interest. You can search with Technical Groups - for example there's about a dozen or so presentations related to Product Design, ranging from "Sensory Quality Evaluation of Clothes Washing Machine Selector Knobs" to "The Boeing 787 Dreamliner --- A Case Study in Large-Scale Design Integration".

And last, but not least, EPIC 2008 (Oct 15-18, Copenhagen). You'll need to click through each section to see the content offerings.

I'll be at the Design Research Conference and at least part of HFES, if anyone would like to meet-up and say hi.

An International Standard for Product Usability

2008-08-04T07:00:00-04:00

I've got a bias against design standards based on my experiences working with organizations that have tried to set them before, rather than after designing a product. Standards should be a way to document a proven approach, not a prescription for how to do something that hasn't been done yet. On the other hand, process standards are useful a priori because they provide guidance on how to do something that you may have not done before. And like design standards, process standards should be updated over time with experience.

With all that said, I am encouraged to see that the International Standards Organization (ISO) has published a set of standards and related process guidelines on "ease of operation for everyday products". This refers primarily to consumer products. Userfocus provides a useful, high-level explanation of the four part ISO standards:

"Part 1, 'Design requirements for context of use and user characteristics', provides a set of sensible design guidance for anyone who is developing consumer technology. It outlines a five-step process that the design team should follow...The remaining three parts of ISO 20282 (parts 2-4) propose test methods for measuring the usability of every day products. The three test methods are essentially the same and will be familiar to anyone who has observed a usability test."

In other words, the standards don't provide significant educational value to experienced usability practitioners, but may be useful for those getting started, or even those with some experience who are looking for guidelines on best practices. Note that you can purchase the documents from the ISO site, but each of the four is over $100 US.

The Userfocus article also stresses an important point about product usability testing - you need large samples to get reliable data in a variable population, but:

"remember that for most consumer products there is only one key goal: 'the most frequent and/or important user goal that the product is intended to support' as it says in the standard. This means that each participant will be asked to carry out just one or two tasks with the product, so the participant session time should be much shorter than with 'thinking aloud' testing. My estimate is that each participant could be briefed, tested and sent on his or her way in 20 minutes."

10 Ways to Think Like a Design Researcher

2008-08-03T21:00:00-04:00

Ed Boyden is a professor at the MIT Media Lab, and he seems to spend a lot of time thinking about... thinking. I learned about his blog when he recently published a notable post on the untapped value of using the brainpower of students to solve real world problems, rather than hypothetical example problems. I highly recommend you read it, but that's not really the point of what I am focusing on here.

What I am focusing on relates to a post from last year titled How To Think - Managing brain resources in the age of complexity. In brief, it discusses ten rules for how to organize information, and you should read it before continuing here so you'll know what I'm talking about.

I was struck by a couple of things in Boyden's article. First, who has the time and motivation to "document everything obsessively"? It seemed like his rules were unrealistic and time-consuming. The second thing that struck me was that while some of these rules are impractical for living by, they make a lot of sense in the context of conducting user research, most notably:

Synthesize new ideas constantly - I think this one is self-explanatory
Learn how to learn (rapidly) - This one too
Work backward from your goal - Design research should focus on producing actionable results to inform design. Keeping this in-mind will make the research analysis process more efficient
Make contingency maps - We call them task flows
Write up best-practices protocols - We call this task analysis
Compose conversation summaries - We call this interviewing

In fact, this list might be read like a series of guidelines for conducting design research.

Boyden provides some technical recommendations for documenting conversations as well (Interesting...and certainly obsessive.):

"I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I've conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago--at a touch, on my laptop."

IDEA Winners in Design Resarch

2008-07-20T11:54:25-04:00

2008 was a landmark year for the design research category of the International Design Excellence Awards, with a research project winning "best in show".

SizeChina, the ergonomic data research project focusing on Asian populations won a Gold for the research category and is sharing best in show honors with the Apple iPhone. SizeChina "assembled data from a representative cross section of people from mainland China to create the first-ever digital database of Chinese head and face shapes. Now, designers hoping to reach the two billion people in the Southeast Asian market will be able to create products that genuinely fit the needs of this audience."

I covered SizeChina last year after attending Roger Ball's presentation at the 2007 IDSA conference.

Coincidentally, the Silver winner (pictured) in the research category also has a Chinese connection - How the torch of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games came into being. According to the site "this project's approach infused a sleek and modern design with symbols of both Chinese culture and the spirit of the Olympic Games", although it's not apparent what research was done to support this.

Bronze award winners included three medical-related projects, a field where user research is typically a critical component. This year, the IDEA site not only lists the award winners, but all of the finalists, which range from color trends to condom dispensing projects.

You can also read more coverage of the awards at Businessweek, and learn about my experience as an IDEA juror this year (although not in the Research category).

Wall Street Journal Special Section on Product Design

2008-07-15T07:11:00-04:00

I'm a few weeks late in reporting on this, but the WSJ had a very relevant section in the Monday, June 23rd edition, that you can access online. Form and Function contains a series of case studies on recent product designs, ranging from golf clubs, to blue jeans, to power tools and even a Buick.

What each of these min-articles has in common is a focus on the role of user research, human factors and usability in the success (and sometime failures) of products.

One of the more interesting examples discusses the MK Diamond portable masonry saw (pictured here). It's a clear demonstration of what happens when you don't design for your users appropriately, and then learn from your mistakes. And while I could argue the finer points of the described design research (e.g. risks of relying on focus groups for identifying requirements, using product designers as representative users, etc.), let's be happy with this sort of message getting across to a mainstream audience:

"The completed product, released in 2003, was an immediate hit, selling 3,120 units in its first year. But through customer feedback, the company began learning about design flaws in the BX3.

For example, the design assumed that most masons would operate the pull-down handle that brings the saw into cutting position with their right hand. It turns out, though, that masons typically grip the material they're cutting with their right hand and pull the handle with their left. That made the handle somewhat awkward for many users.

The company also realized there had been a critical flaw in its design process: It had conducted focus groups with contractors and suppliers who would buy the saw, but not the masons who would actually use it."

"After four years, MK Diamond decided to redesign the saw, and invited masons to its focus groups...designers became familiar with the BX3 by mimicking its everyday use -- carrying it around, transporting it in a pickup truck and cutting cement blocks. All that was videotaped and photographed, and the designers examined the images to help them find ways to make the saw easier to use.

One conclusion was that the saw folded in a way that required a mason to extend his arm outward while carrying it, causing shoulder strain. Tweaking the design, so the user could hold the folded saw closer to his leg, would make it seem lighter and reduce the strain"

BMW Redesigns i-Drive

2008-07-14T11:03:42-04:00

In recent years the BMW i-Drive system has become the poster child for bad usability in interfaces (e.g. Don Norman's criticisms) - a conveniently-named foil to the positive user experience of the iPod. But CNET now reports that a new version of the i-Drive (pictured) is in the works. As a past user of the i-Drive, the new design seems to be addressing some of the key problems I experienced, with dedicated buttons for accessing each of the primary modes, and a single-axis rotary control apparently replacing key functions that previously relied on a multi-directional joystick.

Video - An Ethnography and Interviewing Primer

2008-07-14T07:57:00-04:00

A couple of IIT graduate students (Gabriel Biller & Kristy Scovel) have put together an entertaining video primer on field interview techniques. You'll appreciate it if you've ever done street intercept interviews. The video runs about 30 minutes. I think this pairs well with Sam Ladner's (non-video) design research primer.

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer

5 Guidelines for Ergonomic Observation

2008-07-14T07:11:00-04:00

In my work in medical product ergonomics (as well as other areas of product design), I frequently encounter product teams who are applying field observation in their product development processes. This is great, but much of the time, the teams lack the skills for conducting effective observations. Actually, not so much the lack of skills, but a lack of structure to guide what to observe and how to document observations. This lack of structure typically results in two types of patterns of observation notes:

Write everything - In this case observers write down every event in an ultimately futile effort to document the entire task flow, procedure, etc. This is the professional version of those students from high school who write down everything the teacher writes, even if they don't know what it means. I always loved it when the teacher would write something on the blackboard and then quickly erase it, leaving these human Xerox machines bewildered.
Write what's interesting- The more common approach is to document events or ideas that are out of the ordinary or unusual as they contribute above and beyond the observer's current knowledge base. This is certainly a more manageable approach, but is highly variable due individual observer's thresholds for what is "interesting".

How do you overcome these note-taking habits? When I provide training on "Minimally Invasive User Research", I emphasize a team-based approach where multiple observers take on distinct, but overlapping roles. For example, one observer may track high-level task flows while another focuses on the detail interactions between a user and a medical instrument. But even when attention is focused to a particular set of user interactions, one can fall back in the write everything/write what's interesting habit.

An effective way to break away from those observational note-taking traps is to use guidelines. Guidelines fall between having no structure and an overly-constrained template, by giving a set of elements to pay attention to, but the flexibility to document them as the observer sees fit.

For example, in the case of observing a medical instrument interaction, I created the guideline of FoRCePS. Forceps are a common medical instrument, making the term a memorable acronym for medical product designers. The acronym represents five ergonomic areas to consider during observations, and is a loosely-based expansion of Stephen Pheasant's cardinal rules of anthropometrics. The guidelines are:

Feedback - Identify where the user's access to sensory feedback (e.g. visual, tactile) is comprised
Reach - Identify situations where the user's major limbs (arms, legs) and minor limbs (fingers) must over-extend in order to carry-out a task
Clearance - Identify situations where the user's major limbs (arms, legs) and minor limbs (fingers) must function within a limited space, such as finger holes or a handle
Posture - Identify situations where the user's overall body posture is deviated from neutral position, as well as deviations at key joints (e.g. shoulder, wrist)
Strength - Identify situations where the user must apply excessive or prolonged force for movement or stability, relative to their strength capabilities

Observers are encouraged to consider each of these guidelines individually for both macro and mico ergonomic issues, but also to understand how they interact with each other. For example, if there is limited visual access, compromising feedback, then a user may change his or her body and limb postures to accommodatean improved field-of-view, but in doing so, increase the extent of reach and reduce the effective transfer strength. I recommend watching a brief segment of a medical procedure (or other task where ergonomic compromises are common) to practice paying attention to these 5 issues.

So even with a set of five key principles, there's a lot to pay attention to during live observations and in follow-up video review. Fortunately, FoRCePS and similar mental "tools" give an observer guidance and provide a consistent way to track issues that can be shared with other observers who are focusing on different aspects of the observed task.