FORCE Technology, in collaboration with the design companies EYE-D-Harrit & Sørensen, Blum & Balle a/s and EYE-D-Gramstrup, offers consultation in connection with Human Factors-based design.
We work in a range of product areas and industries, including:
- Maritime equipment and technology
- Medical and medico technical equipment
- Industrial equipment and technology
- Technology in the home
- Technology at the workplace
- Signposting
- Packaging
- Websites and PC software.
Characteristics
Human Factors-based design can be best applied as a design method in connection with the design of all types of products and technologies in which elements such as user-friendliness, intuitiveness and transparency are highly prioritised, e.g. for safety and efficiency reasons or commercial aims.
Human Factors-based design, combined with user-driven innovation at an early point in the development process, can provide important information on users' needs, including users' unconscious needs.
At its core, Human Factors-based design is:
- Safe to use
- Efficient to use
- Easy to use
- Intuitive
- Transparent
- User-oriented.
Background
Human Factors-based design is created on the basis of cross-disciplinary collaborations between psychologists, designers, product developers, engineers, programmers, and others. The basis of these efforts is comprehensive and detailed psychological knowledge in Human Factors, a field in which research and experiments concerning people and technology have been conducted extensively for more than 30 years.
Human Factors-based design is founded on:
- Psychological knowledge, methods and theories
- HMI - human-machine interaction
- HCI - human-computer interaction
- User interfaces
- Interaction design
- Cognitive ergonomics.
User in focus
Human Factors-based design places the user in focus, incorporating and placing emphasis on:
- The user's thought and decision-making processes
- The user's attitudes and emotions
- The user's motivation and intentions
- The user's experiences
- The user's unconscious needs
- The context of usage
- The usage situation
- Safety and risk of faulty use.
Tools and methods
Human Factors-based design is a process that incorporates a wide range of methods and tools taken from the fields of psychology and anthropology, among others. The underlying focus is qualitative rather than quantitative. The aim is to understand, rather than simply describe.
The eight most important tools in Human Factors-based design are:
- Empathy
- Interviews
- Observations
- Usage scenarios
- Context analyses
- Cognitive Task Analysis
- Mock-ups and prototypes
- Usability tests, user tests.
Process
Human Factors-based design is a structured process in which the various tools and methods are incorporated in a carefully planned and documented process from the first phases of registration to the finished product.
Human Factors-based design consists of a project process comprising the following phases, in which the last two phases form an iterative process:
- Registration
- Analysis
- Design proposal (synthesis)
- User involvement
- User test.
Savings and benefit
A very important point of Human Factors-based design is to discover and correct errors as early in the design process as possible, and long before the finished prototype, at which point it is typically too late to make radical changes. This contributes to reducing development - and improves the final product in regard to interaction-related factors.
A good and well thought through interaction design can be all-important to a product's competitiveness and commercial success, and it can be a determining factor in the users' view of the product's reliability, usability and quality. An investment in Human Factors is therefore a good investment.
We work in a range of product areas and industries, including e.g.:
