I have been working on innovation, product design, user experience, human factors and human-computer interaction for over 40 years..
In the mid-1990’s I led a team that demonstrated the need for something richer than usability … and we were working with Don Norman at Apple on this and related ideas and it was around this time that Don coined the term ‘User Experience’.
At IDEO I was part of the Human Factors leadership that revealed how contextual, empathic research could identify users’ implicit and latent needs in ways that designers could act upon.
Since IDEO I have worked at Intel, Logitech, GE Research and Elekta, leading developments in user experience across hardware and software, in consumer products and in complex industrial domains (for example, gas-fired power stations and radiation therapy).
It is a lot more than User Interfaces
The HFES Product Design SIG awards the Stanley Caplan Award every year and in 2018 Elekta’s MRLinac (Unity) was the winning entry, celebrating work that is documented more completely in other publications.
Millions of people worldwide benefit from radiotherapy every year, and the treatment cures more people than cancer drugs. DCA and Elekta describe a project in which human factors played a critical role in the design of new equipment that delivers the therapy to patients
Human Factors and User Experience design have developed relatively independently and from different traditions and yet they both share the all important goal of making better things for people to use. This paper explores how we might bring them closer together and recognise the overlaps – especially in the context of safety-critical systems.
