WEARABLE ELECTRONICS
FEATURE
Human factors in design: A quick primer BY KEVIN BAILEY, CEO, DESIGN 1ST factors analysis impacts product design generally.
The physical aspect
Let’s start with the physical aspect. This refers, on a basic level, to a product’s ergonomics—its size and shape, its materials, and also (in the case of Calibre) how it feels when it’s strapped to your face. For Calibre, we knew we needed the device to be aesthetically pleasing. It also needed to be lightweight and functional, so people would actually be inclined to wear it. That meant conducting human anthropometrics analysis of facial structures. It meant testing user after user for face fit and taking detailed notes. Straps were rapidly iterated and prototyped for maximum comfort and functionality; airflow dynamics testing was conducted to ensure that Calibre stayed comfortable even at high breathing rates. The final product packs a suite of gas and pressure sensors into a tiny, portable wireless electronic module which—crucially—clips comfortably to the face.
The cognitive aspect
Now we move on to the cognitive aspect.This refers to every bit of mental activity that surrounds the consumer’s purchase, use, maintenance and disposal of your product. It means not only the mental steps a consumer needs to take to properly interact with your product—it also means how taking those steps makes the user feel. Do they find the experience empowering, or frustrating? Can they access your product’s features intuitively and with ease, or do they have to pause and think it through, or give up trying? But the cognitive aspect also
10 ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS & TECHNOLOGY / November/December 2023
Calibre has developed a real-time wearable fitness metabolic performance tracker, in conjuction with Design 1st engineers. encompasses the user’s awareness of what they can actually get out of your product. In Calibre’s case, that meant its ability to provide meaningful, reliable data that can improve everyday health and performance. The “cognitive experience,” here, is more detailed information about your body and your health. In designing Calibre, then, we were hyper-conscious of foregrounding those features and making sure end-users would understand, with minimal effort, how to fully access and interpret them.
NO
Product exists in a vacuum - they are handled by specific people, with specfic needs and skill-sets, in specific environments at specific times.
The social, cultural aspects
The physical and cognitive aspects of a product are arguably the most important, but they comprise only a part of human factors analysis. Social, cultural, and emotional aspects can often be just as significant when it comes to widespread product adoption among a given target audience. The social aspect refers to how others might perceive you in relation to the product. It encompasses the concerns that most of us have, as we go about our day—worries about fitting in, about looking weird, about being judged. Obviously, a wearable electronic facemask will always look out of place on a subway car or a busy street unless a majority of people are wearing them. What mattered to us, though, was that our target customer—someone already inclined to exercise regularly and interested in new technology—would feel socially comfortable wearing it while working EPT.CA
Photo: Calibre
To the consumer, products arrive in the world fully formed. Rarely, if at all, do they think about the series of steps that brings a given product from someone’s imagination to their living room. And if they are thinking about those steps, it almost always means the product designer has done something wrong. That’s because the ideal outcome, for the product designer, is that their end-users never think of them at all. The consumer simply uses their product, happily, without complications or complaints, until it’s lost or broken. Of course, it takes an extraordinary amount of work to produce that degree of satisfaction in the consumer. Even the simplest product needs to be analyzed, tested from every angle, before reaching the consumer’s hands. And as it happens, the philosophy underlying this process has a name, well-known to every product designer: human factors analysis. What is human factors analysis? On a simple level, it’s the way that product designers guarantee that their products will function as intended in the real world. No product exists in a vacuum—they are handled by specific people, with specific needs and skill-sets, in specific environments at specific times. Human factors analysis is a way to account for all of those variables—to ensure that a given product will actually work when it reaches store shelves. Let’s use a concrete example: Calibre, a real-time wearable fitness metabolic performance tracker. Below, we’ll take you step-by-step through the human factors analysis process as it applied to our development of Calibre, along the way hopefully providing a clearer picture of how human
