The Identification of Interdisciplinary Synergies: Lessons for HFI from other Human- Centred Design Approaches
Abstract
The aim of this study (Task 3.3.1) was to review other domains and industries for techniques or perspectives that might benefit Human Factors Integration (HFI). The range of domains and topics reviewed was wide and included such things as user-centred design methodologies, software design and management approaches, social, political and advertising research perspectives, and industries such as oil and gas production, mobile phones, architectural design and theme park “imagineering”. Useful discoveries ranged from individual techniques that might be used in the practice of HFI to more general lessons learned in the evolution of practice in other domains that provide talking points for how the practice and culture of HFI might develop in the future.
A general theme to emerge was that many industries are increasing the role that the end users of technology play in its design, in some cases not only working alongside designers and engineers but actually driving the design process rather than merely having input into it. Involving end users increases the likelihood of their needs being met, encourages a sense of shared ownership and ultimately has impact in increasing the chances of user acceptance of new equipment. Within the report we discuss a number of methodologies that could be used as frameworks for facilitating end user involvement in HFI in the Concept stage of CADMID, and also provide outputs that complement more traditional investigations such as workload and task analyses by providing an insight into the subjective feelings of end users.
The success of “auteur”-led approaches in which individuals are empowered to imprint a consistent vision within their creative field suggests that there may be gains to be made from empowering HFI specialists to step beyond traditional constraints upon their area of action and thus to avoid the pitfalls of “design by committee” which may lead to a fragmented, inconsistent form of HFI input into a project.
A matrix-based approach for relating HFI requirements to technical design decisions is described (the Quality Function Deployment or QFD technique). This would seem to be very usable within HFI as a tool for linking HFI requirements to aspects of the User Requirements Document and the System Requirements Document. The QFD technique has other benefits as it can act as a compact audit record illustrating the decisions behind trade-offs and also includes a simple system for estimating the scale of risk inherent in each element of a design.
Consideration of the development of a common design documentation approach for computer programming suggests that HFI could similarly benefit from having an industry standard scheme for presenting findings and data in a visual form to make its outputs more accessible. Other issues discussed include the way in which collaborative design methods can have side-benefits in addressing “soft issues” of team cohesion and morale that might beset integrative disciplines like HFI and how a tightly-nested iterative design process can address the difficulty that is posed by changing requirements in response to the assessment of prototypes.
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