Designing for People Blog

Films about Designing for People

Films about Designing for People

This collection of movies provide an entertaining, and a potentially useful, complement to the textbook “Designing for People: An introduction to human factors engineering“. The films show examples of human factors design concepts in...

Filling a gap in Design Thinking: Design critique process

Filling a gap in Design Thinking: Design critique process

Design Thinking is a popular way of enhancing the design process. Its human-centered focus and emphasis experimentation promise innovative products. Like all simple distillations of a complex process, Design Thinking lacks important elements. It neglects...

An interactive map of Human Factors engineering concepts

An interactive map of Human Factors engineering concepts

The book “Designing for People: An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering” contains many Human Factors engineering concepts from the broad areas of: Design and evaluation techniques Cognitive characteristics of people Physical characteristics of people...

Interactive Signal Detection Theory explainer

Signal Detection Theory has broad applicability and is a central concept in understanding human performance and the inevitability of “human error”.  Its central concepts also apply to understanding the performance of machine learning algorithms...

Interactive visualization for time series data

Data visualization can extend the power of human perception to understand complex phenomena. Viewing data from hundreds or thousands of time series is difficult because simply plotting the raw time series data quickly leads...

Helping people discover the invisible (3D touch)

Helping people discover the invisible (3D touch)

Apple’s 3D Touch provides a new set of interactions, such as firmly pressing rather than tapping.  Unfortunately this is impossible for people to see and hard to discover.  This lack of discoverability is a...

Treating text as data: Analysis of iPhone announcements

Treating text as data: Analysis of iPhone announcements

Statistical analysis typically focusses on numeric, quantitative data. Quantitative analysis of text is less common, but possible. This analysis shows a simple text analysis applied to the transript of the iPhone announcements in 2007...

Benefits of the printed page for comprehension

Benefits of the printed page for comprehension

Physical layout matters: sidebars and other features of print textbooks lead to better comprehension http://www.businessinsider.com/students-learning-education-print-textbooks-screens-study-2017-10 Students prefer electronic versions of text books and they read faster, but they learn more with printed versions.  Not...