Human Factors Engineering
Advice for product innovation, design, and development
Is Your Medical Device Prototype Ready for Testing? Key Considerations for Clinical Trials
US regulations are complex, but navigating early testing successfully is crucial for advancing your medical device. Here's how to prepare.
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Usability and Innovation: Friends or Foes?
Are usability and innovation inherently at odds? Here are three ways to resolve the tension.
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Human Factors Without the Human
To be successful and safe, automated systems need to work as a team with a human partner.
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Can Design Thinking Reduce Stress in Healthcare Environments?
The more it’s studied, the clearer it becomes that stress is the crucial, unseen factor in nearly any health-related situation.
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The Case for Product Usability Testing in Simulated Environments
Why do we regularly transform our usability lab into a kitchen, hospital room, garage, bathroom, living room? It’s not because we’re filming a movie.
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Designing Home Healthcare: Ten Best Practices and Real-World Examples
The world is better when healthcare meets people where they are. As the home evolves into a central hub of healthcare, how can we design for it in a way that delivers safe and effective healthcare for all?
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Why Can’t an ICU Be More Like a Cockpit?
ICUs need a more integrated source of relevant information to help physicians make better decisions and fewer mistakes.
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A Chronically Underutilized Role in New Medical Device Development
Utilizing this role to its fullest could minimize project risk and speed your product to market.
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Slash Project Risk: Incorporate Research Throughout New Product Development
Research enables you to make good decisions throughout new product development, speeding up product development and creating a product that resonates with users. Here’s what research-driven NPD looks like.
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Developing a Product with an LED and Touch User Interface
Sometimes the simplest designs are the most difficult to get right. Here's how we approach the design of a low-information-density user interface.
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AI in Medicine: Establishing Trust Through Usability
In many areas of healthcare where AI has great potential, use of the technology is still in its infancy. In these realms where it’s slower to catch on, a common obstacle to adoption is lack of trust.
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3 UX Best Practices for Medical Product Designers
A few months ago, we discussed three UX trends reshaping medical product design. Here’s how to incorporate them into your device UX efforts.
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Measuring ROI for a Usable User Interface, Part 2
Why should you invest in a usable user interface?
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Measuring ROI for a Usable User Interface, Part 1
Where does your organization stand on the Usability Maturity Ladder—from 'usability as king' to 'usability as a burden'?
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3 UX Trends Reshaping Medical Product Design
The acceleration of tech, and especially the mobile revolution, has deeply impacted both the consumer and medical device industries.
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How Design for Misuse Creates Safer Products
Users often go rogue, using products in ways they weren’t designed to be used. Design for misuse is a way to counteract this.
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How Root Cause Probing Improves Medical Device Design
Often, users don’t know why they made a mistake. Human Factors researches use the art of Root Cause Probing to uncover what went wrong.
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How Affordance Makes Medical Devices Safer
Affordance is the relationship between what something looks like and how it’s used. The user should be able to figure out how to use something just by looking at it.
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How to Design a Medical Device as Safe as an MRI and as Intuitive as a Nest
Medical device manufacturers need to design for a new kind of user. This has big implications not just for the devices they design but also for how they do business.
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A Better Way to Develop a Medical Device with Digital and Physical Elements (Part 1 of 2)
Next-generation medical devices with hardware-software interactions need a new, holistic development methodology.
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Countdown to MDR: Are You Ready for the New EU Medical Device Regulation?
How does the new EU Medical Device Regulation relate to human factors and usability? It depends if your medical product is existing or new.
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Reducing Medical Device Risk with Usability Testing and uFMEAs
Medical devices are commonly recalled due to usability issues that can be prevented with human factors plans and uFMEAs.
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Urgency Understood: User Research and the Value of In-Context Experience
There is no short map of an anticipated journey that medics can plan for while transporting a patient out of any building to the ER. Each scenario and response is unique.
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Pushing each other along
A recent project with Make-A-Wish gave us the chance to make a meaningful connection with a family, which is a great benefit of product design.
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Designing Systems Instead of Assigning Blame
In the immediate aftermath of any newsworthy accident, we often hear the words "human error" or "user error".
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What Does a Doctor Do at a Design Firm?
In medical product design, usability research was too often an afterthought. But you simply can’t expect something to look nice and assume patients and clinicians will know how to use it.
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User-centered design is on the menu
Launching a restaurant is the ultimate personal exercise in user-centered design.
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Human-centered design ... but even more human.
Slowing down and practicing mindfulness in design can lead to better products.
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Designing for healthcare part 4: Empathy is the diagnosis
Listening to, observing, and truly empathizing with healthcare professionals is necessary to deliver new solutions that are user-responsive and empowering.
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Designing for healthcare part 3: The complexity of simplicity
Making the complex simple, or ‘simplexity,’ requires diligence in both iteration (build, test, learn) and designing the system and the details equally well.
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Design approach selected for adjustable hand cycle
The Lend a Handcycle project takes a leap forward with the selection of a scissor-jack design for seat adjustability.
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Man and machine
Recent workplace deaths involving robotic arms are a new variant of the dangers that come with using powerful tools.
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Creating a bike that works for all kids
Progress is being made in our quest to design a fully adjustable hand cycle that can accommodate children with physical disabilities as they grow.
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What’s New in Human Factors for Medical Devices
We noticed more discussion in general this year of user interface (UI) design, often in the context of smart devices. We anticipate UI becoming a stronger focus in upcoming HFES conferences as it continues to become clear that ineffective UIs represent the highest risk to safety and efficacy.
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Experience Design and Healthcare: Wicked Problem and Inspiring Challenge
Experience design is a field prepared to help healthcare workers effectively use new diagnostic technologies, but it is a pretty wicked problem to tackle.
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From Human Factors to User Experience: What’s In A Name?
We recently changed the name of our user interface design team to Interaction Design. The latter encompasses the dynamics of a user’s interaction with a system — including the user’s perceptual, cognitive, and physical interaction with the system, as well as the system’s response to the user.
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