BLOG
RESOURCES
THE COLLECTIVE VOICE
Simplifying the 2023 FDA Guidance on Human Factors Engineering Principles for Combination Products
Reading Time: 4 minutes Like with all medical devices, the application of human factors principles is essential for the development of safe and effective combination products. On September 7, 2023, the FDA released “Application of Human Factors Engineering Principles…
Healthcare Human Factors Engineering and Psychology: Six Perspectives
Reading Time: 3 minutes Understanding the ways humans interact with medical devices is a multifaceted challenge. It requires considering physiological, cognitive, and social aspects of human behavior. Medical Human Factors Engineering utilizes diverse psychological perspectives to optimize the design…
The Sweet Spot in Usability Interviews: How to Get Richer Qualitative Data
Reading Time: 3 minutes In the business of making the world a more user-friendly place for people, we do our best work when we can interact with and talk to those people we represent. There are many great ways…
Everything You Need to Know About the NASA-TLX
Reading Time: 6 minutes The NASA-TLX and Human Factors In 1988, Sandra G. Hart of NASA’s Human Performance Group and Lowell E. Staveland of San Jose State University introduced the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX). With more than 15,000…
Capturing a Human Factors Usability Study: AV Technology
Reading Time: 4 minutes Human Factors and Usability Testing A/V Equipment After weeks of designing your usability study, it’s time to take it live. Your human factors process is working! But how do we capture the audio? How do…
People don’t make errors. Products fail to prevent errors.
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…
Interface Design Basics to Aid Visual Search
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…
Note-Taking Tips in Human Factors Research
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…
Introducing the PCA Model in Human Factors Engineering
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…
Ethical Treatment of Human Factors Test Participants
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…