Designing for Humans

Measuring Emotion in Product Design

Here are links to a couple of research papers that discuss methods for measuring emotional responses to products.  Both provide conceptual backgrounds and discuss a range of measurement approaches, including verbal and non-verbal (e.g. visual) rating systems that can be adapted to a range of situations.

Measuring Emotions - Development and application of an instrument to measure emotional responses to products

Affective experiences in the Home: measuring emotion

Design Research Discussion Board

The Core77 Boards site has a discussion forum on Design Research, that currently features a thread on the future of design research methodologies.   Worth taking a look at and making a contribution.

Remote Control Design

A case study from the Design Council discusses how ergonomics and user testing led to the succesful design of a cable remote control for a broad population.

Trends in Design Technology and Issues

Successful designers will need to continue integrating technological, business and social requirements as design plays a role in more areas of society.

The UK Design Council has identified four key trends that will impact design, and provides link to related resources:

• Miniaturization
• Digitization
• Smart Materials
• Pervasive Computing

The common theme of these areas is the potential to design products with greater capabilities, flexibility and functionality than every before.

Related, are emerging design issues:

• Sustainable design
• Social responsibility
• Service design
• Experience design

How to Use This Site

Tips for using and contributing to this site:

• All content is accessible from the categories section in the right-hand column.  Shortcuts to the most recent content postings are listed in the left-hand column.
• You are encouraged to add your thoughts or feedback to any posting by using the Comments link at the bottom of each posting.
• Requests to add content and links or submissions can be sent to Rob Tannen - rtannen@electronicink.com
• Read the section on RSS if you wish to subscribe to this site and receive content updates.

FDA Human Factors Resources

Online Food & Drug Administration (FDA) resources, information and standards for  medical device usability and saftey:

FDA Human Factors Program

Overview of Touchscreen Research

Many products rely on touchscreen input.  Appendix A of Gregory Bender's dissertation provides an excellent overview of touchscreen technology, human factors and design research, with general guidelines.  Note that this tends to focus on larger touchscreens applications (e.g. kiosks, ATMs), rather than smaller devices (PDAs, media players).

The appdenix starts on page 78 of this document, which is actually page 89 of the PDF file:

http://www.thisoldtractor.com/gtbender/papers/dissertation.pdf

Strength Data

Research conducted for by the British government's Department of Trade and Industry on strength factors across ages and nationalities.  Primarily focused on hand-related characteristics (e.g. grip, push-pull strength).

Strength Data for Design Safety - Phase 1

Strength Data for Design Safety - Phase 2

Anthropometric Data Sources

One of the most common requests from the recent survey was for anthropometric data sources.  Unfortunately, most data sources are proprietary and/or costly. 

Here are some of the leading data and measurement providers:

Civilian American and European Surface Anthropometry Resource Project—CAESAR

PeopleSize

AnthroTech

Here are links to a few publicly available sources, but please comment if you know of more modern and diverse data sets that are available:

U.S. Military Anthropometric Data Sets

NASA Anthropometric Guidelines (based on American males and Japanese females, 2000)

Anthropometric Data of Children

UPDATE: The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society has recently published Guidelines for Using Anthropometric Data in Product Design that discusses methods, resources and practices for designing for the human body.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

What is it?

RSS is a format for publishing online content.  Web page content is typically published in HTML format.  RSS is an alternate format that is used to deliver text content to RSS readers or aggregators.  RSS aggregators are web sites or tools that allow you to subscribe to RSS-compatible Web content.  Think of an RSS aggregator as an inbox, but instead of receiving emails, you receive messages from your selected sites and blogs about new content on those sites.  This allows you to receive new site content when it is published, in a single place - and you won't have to routinely check your favorite sites to see what has been added.

How do I do this?

You first need to download or subscribe to an RSS aggregator.  Recommended examples (that are also free) include You Subscribe: RSS and News Gator Online.   These tools allow you to receive subscribed content within Outlook or via a single, customized Web page.

You will then need to subscribe to sites of interest.  Many sites and blogs provide RSS-format versions of their content.  To subscribe to the IDSA Human Factors section site (this site), you'll need to subscribe using your RSS aggregator to the following URL:

http://www.humanfactors.typepad.com/idsa/index.rdf

Survey Results

Here's a synopsis of the survey results we collected to provide input on the content for this site.  Thanks to all who have responded.  You can also view a more detailed summary of survey results.

• Site Users - Not surprisingly 84% of respondents designated themselves as designers. The next highest response was for project/product manangers (24%), and then human factors specialists (13%).
• Content - 92% of respondents were very interested in guidelines and data to support design decisions, 84% in methods and best practices and 71% in case studies.  Suggestions for specific topics ranged from ergonomic and hardware design guidelines, to quantiative measures of emotion, and teaching tools for human factors.  We will attempt to address all of the suggested topics in one way or another in the months ahead.
• Expected Usage  - 47% responded that they are very likely to use the site, with 40% somewhat likely to use the site.  63% indicated that they would use the site on an as-needed basis.
• Other Section Sites - The most commonly visited other section sites were Desigh History (50%), Materials and Processes (50%), Product Development (44%), Medical (31%) and Universal Design (31%).  Nearly half of the respondents (48%) indicated that they are not aware of other section sites.
• Site Updates/RSS - Over 97% of respondents had never heard of, or were not familiar with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as a method of receiving site updates.  We will follow-up with a posting explain the benefits and how-tos of RSS.

We've already made some minor updates based on the suvey responses and will be adding suggested content shortly, but we'll need your suggestions and input to continiously provide useful information.  Please email Rob Tannen,  rtannen@electronicink.com, with ideas or contributions.

We also plan to share this information with other IDSA section groups so that they can improve the awareness and content of their respective section sites.

Site Survey

We're conducting an online survey to gather input on the type of content that people would like to see on the site.

If you have not received an email invitation, feel free to complete the survey using this link:

http://www.surveymk.com/s.asp?u=27050926866

If you have received an email invitation (HF section members), this link is the same one in your invitaiton, so please do not submit multiple surveys.

The results from the survey will be presented (and eventually, reflected) on the site in the near future.