DESIGNING *for humans

How will the metaverse be designed as it disrupts design?

Much is being written about the potential impact of the metaverse on consumers & businesses, but little about how it will affect those creating it – the researchers, designers, & developers who will define these new experiences. While emerging roles, skills & tools will make design management more complex & critical, human-centered methods remain at the core. 

Published on EY.com - https://www.ey.com/en_us/consulting/how-will-metaverse-be-designed-as-it-disrupts-design

 

"Green" Ergonomics in LEED Building Design

 

Several months ago I discussed the relevance of user-centered design to the successful design of sustainable products and services.  Now a more concrete (literally) example of the intrinsic connection between human factors and green design.  

Alan Hedge writes about The Sprouting of "Green" Ergonomics (PDF) in the December issue of the HF&ES Bulletin.  Hedge reports on the new version of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Green Building Rating System, which includes specific guidelines and credits for creating an ergonomic environment.

The guidelines focus primarily on office workstation ergonomics (although industrial settings are touched on as well).  For example, the LEED guidlines cover standards around display adjustability and glare, work surface dimensions, and chair adjustability.  You can download relevant "green" ergonomic checklists from Cornell's ergonomic resource.

Adding ergonomics to LEED requirements seems like a natural extension to me - both are targeted at improving the health and comfort of individuals who work within buildings.  There may also be some direct correlations between the more traditional LEED categories such as materials & resources, and ergonomics. For instance, a poorly fitted workstation may be more readily replaced than one chosen appropriately - thereby leading to increased materials use.

Hedge also makes the point that the new LEED guidelines will change perceptions about office ergonomics - from a reactive, problem-solving model in most cases, to a proactive problem-avoiding approach as it is intended.

 

Service Design: A Model for Green Product Design

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.

Eight Design Research Themes for 2008: Technologies and Methodologies

2007 has witnessed the continued maturity of user research practices in product design/development organizations. As this continues, we look to 2008 and key areas of growth and change in user research technologies and methodologies. What many of these themes have in common reflects a shift from how to conduct research, to how to manage all of the research findings and results – clearly a positive trend and a nice problem to have.   Stay tuned into 2008 as these themes are tracked in further detail.

Technologies

Even a casual reader of this web log will have observed the ever-growing options in data gathering technologies available for a variety of research applications. For 2008, the themes in technology are diverse – from high definition video to a new resource of anthropometric head measurements of the Chinese population. But the more compelling tools address needs in organizing and analyzing qualitative data:

1. High Definition (HD) Video- HD video cameras are rising in popularity while falling in price. Higher resolution video means larger file sizes and typically more time for video editing and file management. On the other hand, greater visual clarity can be extremely valuable for studying fine motor control tasks, small control/interface element usage and visually-rich environments. Surgical observation and consumer electronics usability are two applicable areas for HD video.

2. International Anthropometric References – Much of the reference anthropometric data used to guide designs is based on the body dimensions European and North American populations, limiting applicability and, ultimately fit, to a broader user population. The availability of three-dimensional scanning technology, while still time-consuming and expensive, is driving the inclusion of additional populations. Size China is a program to create the first-ever digital database of Chinese head and face shapes for helmets, sunglasses and surgical masks. Such resources will provide a richer starting point for guiding form and size in product designs, but of course are not a replacement for fit testing with real participants.

3. Qualitative Data Management Software – As research capabilities mature, organizations will deal with a new set of challenges around handling larger volumes of research data. Research teams will struggle with organizing, presenting and efficiently re-using findings across projects. With that “embarrassment of riches, there is a need for techniques and tools that support research data management. For example, QSR Internationals’s forthcoming NVivo 8 provides a structure for entering, tagging and querying various forms of multimedia, qualitative data across multiple projects. These types of tools will enable more effective collaboration amongst both localized and geographically distributed researchers, and can provide a centralized repository for observational data.
4. Qualitative Data Analysis Software – The value of well-conducted research is extremely limited if it is not easily organized for effective communication. It is especially challenging to organize, analyze and interpret qualitative data such as user interview transcripts and observational field notes. Following many years of adapting general purpose software and technology, we now have access to a variety of software and hardware tools to support planning, collection, analysis and sharing of research data. Several new technologies can support unstructured data analysis in various ways including searching speech via text and syntactically mapping information. For example, IBM’s Many Eyes application visualizes text in a tree-like branching structure to enable more efficient analysis and data mining.

 

Methodologies

Design research methods will continue to adapt for studying the wider range of user experiences, beyond the primary product. Frameworks and techniques for mapping out user touch points will assist research planning, which will become specialized to particular domains (e.g. medical vs. consumer). Threading across all of this is the need for guidelines for effective research communication and presentation:

5. Comparative Ethnography - While many organizations are using ethnographic observation to understand end-user perspectives and stimulate innovative thinking, such research is frequently focused on a limited set of tasks and users. But a growing trend is to use ethnographic methodology to identify differences between contexts. For example, in a study of automobile driving behavior, Bresslergroup’s research plan not only focused on the in-car driving experience, but studied related, non-driving activities. Observing how comparable tasks (e.g. planning a route, choosing music to enjoy) are conducted in disparate contexts (in this case, in car vs. in home) provides unique insights to inform creative solutions.

6. Service Design - Beyond the “total product lifecycle” approach, organizations will need to understand where they fit within the range of loosely tied user experiences beyond the product itself. For example, medical implant designers should expand user research beyond surgery to understand the touch points that potential patients, caregivers and healthcare providers utilize to make treatment decisions, prepare for surgery, and deal with recovery and beyond. The emerging discipline of service design provides a framework for understanding how multiple types of providers and users interact across the various products, interfaces and environments where interactions and decisions occur.

7. Domain-Specific Research Methods – Although research practices can vary among domains (e.g. medical, consumer, industrial), core methods remain consistent. But as research teams mature, there is a movement towards industry-specific user research and design techniques. For example, in appliance design, usability testing with high-fidelity simulations is frequently necessary to elicit reliable performance feedback from consumers. By contrast, healthcare professionals are typically more capable of responding to lower-fidelity prototypes, partly attributable to their professional problem-solving processes.

8. Presenting Design Research – Typically, product development organizations can effectively present and communicate their work and capabilities in design and engineering. But even when products are backed by quality user research, teams may struggle with effectively communicating its influence on product design. Similarly, organizations have difficulty evaluating the research capabilities of potential employees. The Industrial Designers Society of Americas (IDSA) is leading the way in developing guidelines for design research presentations, starting with the organization of design research portfolio workshop & review at the Northeast District conference this April in Philadelphia.

Connecting '07 - Service Design Results

A summary report from the service design analysis of the Connecting '07 conference has been posted.  The report includes an overview of the service design research and suggestions for improving the conference experience in four areas, Invitation (pre-conference), Orientation (navigating at the conference, Participation (involvement in conference activities) and Memorializing (takeaways following the conference)

Among the key findings and recommendations are:

• Leveraging web technology to support planning and choice leading up to the conference
• Supporting sustainability through recycling during the conference
• Promoting the growth of non-IDSA conference-related activities (e.g. Airbed & Breakfast)
• Enabling attendees to create a personalized "scrapbook" integrating notes, photos, sketches and other related contents collected during the conference

Download the Connecting '07 Service Design Results

Industrial design and...

Two upcoming presentations in San Francisco will discuss the relationships between industrial design and related disciplines:

• Interaction Design and ID: On the evening of Thursday, October 18th, IxDA San Francisco is hosting INTERSECTION: Where Interaction and Industrial Design Meet featuring case studies from Cooper, frog design, Motorola and IDEO.  The event coincides with Connecting '07 IDSA national conference and is "an evening of dialog between two closely related but often siloed fields: Industrial Design and Interaction Design. On October 18 at C|net, we will hear case studies from Cooper, frog design, Motorola and IDEO, highlighting the intersection point of the two disciplines and the ups and downs of collaboration."  For more information - http://gamma.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=21100 - no registration required.
• Service Design and ID: On Friday October 19th, at the Connecting '07 conference, Rob Tannen (disclosure: that's me) will be presenting Connecting Service Design and Industrial Design.  As the title implies, this will focus on the important role of industrial designers within the context of service design.  This will include using the conference experience itself as an example of service design analysis.  For more information/schedule -  http://www.idsa.org/PDFs/connecting07_schedule.pdf - IDSA conference registration required.

Stay tuned for information about these two presentations following the conference.

Slideshare - online presentation sharing

Although it's technically still in beta, slideshare is definitely worth checking out.  Self-described as "the world's largest community for sharing presentations on the web", the site provides searchable, user-provided presentation content - typically Powerpoints or PDFs. 

The content is largely made-up of voluntarily posted presentations following conferences.  One of the co-founders is Rashmi Sinha, who is a leader in user experience technology, so it's no coincidence that there's a good amount of content on design, research and usability available.  For example, a search for "human factors" resulted in 50+ presentations ranging from ethnography, to game design, to farming.

Of course, what typically makes for an engaging in-person presentation (e.g. interesting visuals), is not necessarily effective for reviewing a Powerpoint out of context - ironically, in those cases, text-heavy slides may communicate most thoroughly.

Incidentally, there's a lack of presentations on Industrial Design - hopefully we can encourage presenters at Connecting '07 to post there presentations at Slideshare.

Rob Tannen

Upcoming Service Design Conference

The second Emergence conference will be held at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) on September 7 -9.

From the conference site:

The second annual Emergence conference will explore how different design disciplines work together to create the tangible and intangible artifacts of service. We will address how to design services, consider how business can benefit from the increased value of a well-designed service, and continue to define this emerging design field.

The program includes speakers from Core77, Electronic Ink, IBM and IDEO, to name a few.

I'm planning to attend, so check back for a post-conference review.  Also stay tuned for an upcoming service design/industrial design connection.

-Rob Tannen

IDSA 2007 Conference Research Project

If you're an IDSA member, you must have heard by now, but if not, the 2007 IDSA/Icisd World Design Conference (Connecting07) will take place in San Francisco, CA from October 17-20.

I'll be coordinating an effort to evaluate the conference from a service design perspective and envision the future conference experience.  And I'm looking for your help - we need designers and researchers  who can spend a bit of their time at the conference documenting their experiences.  You don't need to be an expert - students and first-time conference attendees are welcome.  If you are registered, or even just planning to attend, and would be interested in getting involved, please contact Rob Tannen, vice-chair of the IDSA Human Factors section via email: [email protected]