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As a human factors psychologist, I am often asked to predict where users will (or have) run into problems with a product by evaluating its usability — the measure of its ease of use and ease of learning.  At the conclusion of these evaluations, I categorize the issues I’ve found by severity on a scale […]

Earlier this year members of our design team attended World Information Architecture Day 2019 in Pittsburgh, a day-long event of thought-provoking workshops and presentations given by remarkable speakers. World IA Day is an annual, global, conference that celebrates the field of Information Architecture, with local events coordinated by volunteers and all following the same theme. […]

Sooner or later, everyone who works in design hears something along the lines of but we’re all designers – usually from a Project Manager who didn’t agree with the designer and wanted to go in a different direction. Of course, it’s true. We do all design. Most of us have designed the layout of the furniture […]

When I started our Designing for the Age Enhanced series, I thought the articles would informative and fun to write. But, since I’m in my 40s, I have to admit that being reminded about how bad my eyes and ears are already getting, what’s going to happen to my senses of smell and taste, and […]

Welcome to the latest article in our “Designing for the Age Enhanced” series — which internally we’ve started referring to as the “Getting Older Sucks” series. We’ve already talked about what happens to our senses of sight and hearing as we age and some of the mental slowdowns that we experience, and, of course, how these […]

“It is estimated most human beings only use 10% of their brain’s capacity.” That’s a line from Morgan Freeman’s character in the new Sci-Fi movie Lucy, coming out this summer. It’s a sentiment I’ve heard repeated by CEOs; it regularly pops up in commercials; and yes, it is a perpetual favorite of Hollywood (Heroes, Flight of […]

If you’ve read the previous posts in this series, you understand the changes that happen to our vision and hearing as we age and, more importantly, how those changes affect our interactions with the products we use. For this article, I want to look at the impact that aging has on some of our basic […]

Recently we posted the first in a series of articles discussing the changes we undergo as we age and how those changes affect our interactions with products and interfaces. The first looked at changes our eyes undergo; now, we’ll examine the changes to our ears – and the rest of our auditory system – and […]

Carolynn Johnson, Daedalus Research Manager, recently presented Management System for a Pediatric Heart Pump: A Design Research Case Study at the 2013 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care: Advancing the Cause. This year’s topics was “Advancing the Cause,” and presenters were asked to extend their message beyond “incorporate human factors” and […]

Recently, one of our clients asked us to craft user profiles and design recommendations for a product centered on older populations. If you search the internet for this, you’ll find dozens of pages of design recommendations for older users – but you’ll also find that there’s a lot of information missing. Most of these websites don’t […]