Appliance Design - September 2008 - (Page 20) INDUSTRIAL DESIGN & HUMAN FACTORS Clarity Comple xit y User-centered design improves interfaces. & I by rob tannen September 2008 The Apple iPhone demonstrates that complex technology and clarity of use can co-exist. (Image: Apple.) Rob Tannen is director of research at product development firm Bresslergroup, Philadelphia. He also serves as vice-chair of the Human Factors Section at the Industrial Designers Society of America. am not your typical appliance user. I have a doctorate in human factors and I am a Certified Professional Ergonomist. But, more importantly, I grew up in parallel with the emergence of consumer digital technology. I had an Apple II computer in the early 1980s and a Radio Shack TRS-80 even before that. So you might think that I’d be ahead of the curve when it comes to figuring out how to use complex appliances and products. In fact, I’m not. Sure, I am adept at setting an oven clock or storing a number in a cell phone, but it still requires a decent amount of effort and learning for each new product. And I certainly can’t assemble anything out of the box very well. As a practitioner, I’ll be the first to admit that designing usable products is not easy, particularly in the consumer appliance market where the range of user characteristics such as physical capabilities, usage patterns, and technical skills is so broad and variable. There are also internal challenges to creating an easy-to-use product. Product design teams that are inexperienced with usercentered design methods may be intimidated by the process and unsure where to start to holistically improve a design. At the opposite end of the spectrum, organizations with in-place user-research processes may be overloaded with interpreting qualitative and quantitative data to drive actionable design decisions. Most importantly though, there are misconceptions about the relationship between product complexity and usability. There’s an implicit assumption among many in the appliance design world that, all other things being equal, a product with more features will be a product that is more difficult to use. Some have portrayed technology as the enemy of usabil- 20 applianceDESIGN www.applianceDESIGN.com http://www.appliancedesign.com
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