Basic Design and Evaluation Methods

Question 1

What product design phases will you find Human factors methods and principles?

Answer 1

applied in virtually all product design phases:
• pre-design analysis,
• conceptual and technical design,
• final test and evaluation

Question 2

How can you demonstrate overall advantages of the HF effort?

Answer 2

Cost/Benefit Analysis can be performed

Question 3

What are some benefits that you can estimate?

Answer 3

• Increased sales
• Decreased compensation and litigation costs
• Decreased cost of providing training
• Decreased customer support costs
• Decreased development costs
• Decreased maintenance costs
• Increased user productivity
• Decreased user errors
• Improved quality of service
• Decreased training time
• Decreased user turnover

Question 4

When should HF be involved in the design process?

Answer 4

as early as possible in the product (or system) design to maximally benefit the final product

Question 5

What are the stages of System Development Life Cycle?

Answer 5

Front-End Analysis
 Conceptual design
 Iterative Design and Testing
Design of Support Materials
 System Production
Implementation and Evaluation
System Operation and Maintenance
 System Disposal

Question 6

Goal of the human factors specialist

Answer 6

Find a system design that supports the user’s needs rather than making a system to which users must adapt

Question 7

What is user-centered design?

Answer 7

Know the user or honor the user

;embodied in a subfield known as usability engineering

Question 8

What are the 4 general approaches to design in Usability engineering?

Answer 8

Early focus on the user
Empirical measurement
Iterative design
Participatory design

Question 9

What is ‘usability’?

Answer 9

Usability is primarily the degree to which the system is

easy to use or “user friendly”

Question 10

What are the 5 metrics of measuring ‘usability’?

Answer 10

Learnability
Efficiency
Memorability
Errors
Satisfaction