measuring HMI
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At the Human Factory we pride ourselves in often being able to crack the underlying principles behind good design for human brains and bodies.
But sometimes it's possible to find the right design, but not know why. The insight here is that cultural / marketplace evolution over time tends to select for good UX and HMI design, and although the designers themselves aren't guided by explicit principles, the pattern found across the marketplace can be measured and quantified, allowing us to find the optimal solution for your business.
For example, one of the figures below (from a Human Factory publication) shows how the number of buttons varies with the complexity of the electronic device (as estimated by the length of the user manual). For many kinds of electronic device there are law-like curves relating the number of buttons to the complexity of the device, laws that none of these device manufacturers actually know. Any given device might deviate significantly from the curve, but by seeing the general pattern across many devices of varying levels of complexity, we can glean what appears to be the curve implicitly driving the pattern. And, if you know the law-like curve, then you can determine how many buttons your device should have given its level of functional complexity, and be on the curve, thus achieving a better design.
As a second example, a second figure below (from another paper by Human Factory scientists) shows the number of academic departments at universities, across three orders of magnitude of university size. Universities with more faculty tend to have more departments, and not simply proportionally more. Rather, the number of departments tends to rise as the square root of the number of faculty. Some principle appears to be driving universities to have this structure, although no one at any of the universities knows of these principles, or even of these empirical laws. But if you know, then you can structure your university with the right number of departments for your university's size.
At the Human Factory we excel in acquiring data of these kinds, with many publications along these lines, finding the unknown laws that society has discovered without realizing it. Laws that can be used by your business to fit the law even more closely.
But sometimes it's possible to find the right design, but not know why. The insight here is that cultural / marketplace evolution over time tends to select for good UX and HMI design, and although the designers themselves aren't guided by explicit principles, the pattern found across the marketplace can be measured and quantified, allowing us to find the optimal solution for your business.
For example, one of the figures below (from a Human Factory publication) shows how the number of buttons varies with the complexity of the electronic device (as estimated by the length of the user manual). For many kinds of electronic device there are law-like curves relating the number of buttons to the complexity of the device, laws that none of these device manufacturers actually know. Any given device might deviate significantly from the curve, but by seeing the general pattern across many devices of varying levels of complexity, we can glean what appears to be the curve implicitly driving the pattern. And, if you know the law-like curve, then you can determine how many buttons your device should have given its level of functional complexity, and be on the curve, thus achieving a better design.
As a second example, a second figure below (from another paper by Human Factory scientists) shows the number of academic departments at universities, across three orders of magnitude of university size. Universities with more faculty tend to have more departments, and not simply proportionally more. Rather, the number of departments tends to rise as the square root of the number of faculty. Some principle appears to be driving universities to have this structure, although no one at any of the universities knows of these principles, or even of these empirical laws. But if you know, then you can structure your university with the right number of departments for your university's size.
At the Human Factory we excel in acquiring data of these kinds, with many publications along these lines, finding the unknown laws that society has discovered without realizing it. Laws that can be used by your business to fit the law even more closely.