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Reading Time: 3 minutes No matter the product—an inhaler, a surgical robot, a medication pump, or a smartphone application—following a human factors engineering process will use usability studies. Usability testing is a research method designed to evaluate a product’s…

Reading Time: 4 minutes Visual search and user interface design are completely intertwined. Visual search and object detection concern not only our human visual system searching through an area of space (i.e., a screen), but also locating the desired…

Reading Time: 4 minutes Picture this… You’ve successfully completed your usability test. You open your notes to begin analyzing the data and they look like gibberish. Now you’re forced to go back to watch study videos to make sense…

Reading Time: 4 minutes Human Factors Engineering is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on optimizing the design of products, systems, and environments by studying how people interact with them (Branaghan et al., 2020). As part of that undertaking, human…

Reading Time: 6 minutes As a university student, I worked in a psychobiology lab where we studied the physiology of emotions. Our lab housed rats, mice, and chickens. Because I was a lowly undergraduate, I was saddled with some…

Reading Time: 5 minutes Top-down and Bottom-up Cues: Using Perceptual Process in Injection Device Designs Human Factors Engineers are often intrigued by peoples’ candid reactions to new devices. Recently, my friend received a new medication that needed to be…

Reading Time: 3 minutes We commonly get questions about what we do and what it’s like to work with us. So, we’ve put together a brief list of frequently asked questions and their answers. Of course, give us a…

Reading Time: 5 minutes Eye-tracking provides valuable insights into the cognition of healthcare providers, patients, caregivers, and medical device users. Recent advancements have made this technology more accessible and affordable. Yet, despite its growing popularity, numerous misconceptions about eye-tracking…

Reading Time: 4 minutes Making medical product text legible Medical products have text (groundbreaking news, right?). From labels on devices, to results on a screen, to IFUs, there is a lot of text to consider when designing medical devices…

Reading Time: 3 minutes Usable instructions for use (IFUs) for medical devices are more than step-by-step processes for users. They also must explain why the product should be used as described. Naturally, the ultimate goal of most readers of…