Designing Pleasurable Products

An Introduction to the New Human Factors

Patrick W. Jordan

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781135734107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Ingeniería industrial

Written by Patrick W. Jordan, a leader in cognitive ergonomics, this landmark resource not only explores usability, but takes the reader beyond it. The author explains how good designs can appeal to the user holistically, leading to products that are a joy to own and use. He examines how human factors are being used more and more in the product design process within commercial manufacturing organizations. The book delineates a practical framework, providing a structured approach to the creation of product design concepts, describes new design and evaluation techniques and established methodologies, such as Kansei Engineering, and includes a pre-validated questionnaire for evaluating designs.

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PLEASURE WITH PRODUCTS

Beyond usability

The rise of human factors: usability as a competitive issue

Human factors have come to increased prominence in recent years. This is manifest in a number of ways: one is the ever expanding literature relating to human-factors issues, including books and journals, and even magazine and newspaper articles; another is the number of international conferences and seminars dedicated to human-factors issues. Examples of the latter include the Ergonomics Society Conference in the UK and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Conference in the USA. However, perhaps the most important reflection on how seriously human-factors issues are now being taken is the sharp increase in human-factors professionals employed in industry. In particular, human factors are being taken increasingly seriously as an issue within product design. Industrial design departments within most major companies and design consultancies now employ a number of specialists charged with ensuring that product designs fit the needs of those who will use the products. In addition, professionals such as industrial designers and software designers are increasingly expected to have an awareness of human-factors issues and to put them at the centre of the design process.

This has not always been the case. Indeed, the level of integration of human factors within design seems to have gone through three distinct phases, as follows.

Phase 1—being ignored

Going back fifteen to twenty years, few manufacturing organisations employed human-factors specialists, even amongst the larger companies, and those that did were likely to be involved in defence work. Certainly, human factors were not much of a consideration for companies making consumer products.

Phase 2—‘bolt-on’ human factors

This was the era of creating a new product and then asking the humanfactors specialist to help add on a nice interface. The problem with this, of course, was that by this stage in the product-creation process the basic interaction structure had often been decided, leaving room only for comparatively superficial interface improvements. Nevertheless, this marked an era when more human-factors specialists were finding employment in industry and, although sometimes misunderstood, human-factors issues started attracting attention.

Phase 3—integrated human factors

And so to the present day. In a number of companies human factors have become seen as something that is inseparable from the design process. Within most major manufacturing companies, product development protocols make provision for the consideration of human-factors issues throughout the design process. This gives the human-factors specialist the chance to influence the design right from its conception.

So why have these changes come about? Probably the main reason is the perceived commercial advantage that good human factors—indeed good design generally—can bring to a manufacturing organisation. In many product areas, technical advances and manufacturing processes have reached a level of sophistication that makes any potential competitive advantage, in terms of functionality, reliability and manufacturing costs, marginal. Many manufacturers now see design as one of the few areas in which it is still possible to gain significant advantages over the competition. Good human factors are, of course, central to achieving excellence in design.

Indeed, customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in terms of their knowledge of human factors and the quality level of human factors that they expect with a product. Whilst once good human factors may have been seen as a bonus, they are now becoming an expectation. Users are no longer willing to accept difficulties in interacting with products as a price they must pay for ‘technical wizardry’. Customers now demand technical wizardry and good human factors and will be antagonised by products that fail to support an adequate quality of use. In the end, of course, such products will also antagonise those who manufacture them as they will find that their customers soon start to look elsewhere (Green and Jordan 1999).

Perhaps the product that brought about the biggest ‘sea change’ with respect to attitudes towards human factors was the Apple Macintosh computer. Apple first came to prominence as the user-friendly computer company by producing interfaces that relied on direct manipulation, rather than command lines, for executing particular tasks. The interface was, andindeed still is, based on an office metaphor, with icons representing, for example, desks, folders, files and waste-paper bins. The approach, then, was to take an environment that the user was familiar with—the office—and to design the interaction structure within this paradigm. The interface to the Apple Macintosh computer is illustrated in Figure 1.1.

At the time this was a revolutionary step. Previously, software packages had largely relied on command line interfaces. Interacting with these required the learning and memorising of strings of characters and numbers—a task that became more and more demanding as the range of functionality associated with such packages increased. Furthermore, the interaction protocols tended to be ‘unforgiving’ of error. If the user were to omit even a single character or put a character out of place, the command would not be executed. Rather, the computer would respond with some unhelpful and technical-sounding message—usually ‘syntax error’. These old-style interfaces, then, put the technology at the centre of the design process rather than the person using the machine. The user was expected to learn a language whose structure mirrored that of the language used by the professionals who developed and programmed the software. The Macintosh’s office metaphor turned things around. Now the computer was speaking the user’s language.

This had a profound effect on the way that computer use spread within society—by the end of 1998 there were forty-five computers per hundred Americans and around thirty per European (The Economist 1998:46). Ten to fifteen years earlier virtually nobody owned one. Whilst previously computer operation had been a specialist activity that required extensive learning, now personal computers started to become accessible to the non-specialist—surely a major factor behind the huge growth in computer use in the workplace and at home. It also led to a change in users’ attitudes and expectations with respect to personal computing. No longer was computing seen as an opaque and complex activity. Users have come to expect that software packages and operating environments will be both supportive of their needs and simple to use. The development of the Windows environment is further evidence of the software industry’s acknowledgement of this change in attitude. It is no longer seen as commercially viable to mass market software that is not designed around a user-centred paradigm.

Changing times: usability as a dissatisfier

Human factors, then, have been seen to add value to products by helping to make them easy to use. However, because customers have come to expect products to be easy to use, usability has moved from being what marketing professionals call a ‘satisfier’ to being a ‘dissatisfier’. In other words, people are no longer pleasantly surprised when a product is usable, but are unpleasantly surprised by difficulty in use. In parallel with this change in attitude comes a change in the status of human factors within the design process. If the contribution of human factors is simply to enhance usability, then it will come to be seen as a problem-solving discipline, rather than as a discipline that is positively increasing the market value of the products to which it contributes.

That addressing usability issues is a vital role for human factors is not in dispute. However, usability-based approaches are limited. By looking at the relationship between people and products in a more holistic manner, the discipline can contribute far more. Such holistic approaches are known as ‘pleasure-based’ approaches and are increasingly being adopted by industry-based human-factors professionals—many examples will be given throughout this book. This has led to approaches that look both at and beyond usability. Such approaches have been termed the ‘New Human Factors’ (Fulton 1993).

Hierarchy of consumer needs

The psychologist Abraham Maslow described a ‘hierarchy of human needs’ (Maslow 1970). This model viewed the human as a ‘wanting animal’ whorarely reaches a state of complete satisfaction. Indeed, if a nirvana is reached it will usually only be temporary because once one desire has been fulfilled another will soon surface to take its place. Maslow’s hierarchy is illustrated in Figure 1.2. The idea is that as soon as people have fulfilled the needs lower down the hierarchy, they will then want to fulfil the needs higher up. This means that even if basic needs—such as physiological and safety ones—have been met, people will still meet with frustration if their higher goals are not met.

Figure 1.1 The interface to the Apple Macintosh computer

The merits or otherwise of Maslow’s theories are not a matter for discussion in this text (a good overview of Maslow’s work can be found in Hjelle and Ziegler 1981). The point to note is simply that when people get used to having something, they then start looking for something more. This lesson may apply to human factors as much as to anything else. Taking the idea of a hierarchy of needs and applying it to human factors, the model illustrated in Figure 1.3 is proposed. It is intended to reflect the way that the contribution of human factors to product design might be seen—either explicitly or implicitly—by both manufacturers and those who buy and use their products.

Level 1—functionality

Clearly, a product will be useless if it does not contain appropriate functionality: a product cannot be usable if it does not contain the functions necessary to perform the tasks for which it is intended. If a product does not have the right functionality this will cause dissatisfaction. In order to be able to fulfil people’s needs on this level, those involved in product creation—including, and indeed especially, the human-factors specialist—must have an understanding of what the product will be used for and the context and environment in which it will be used.

Self-actualisation needs ↑
Esteem needs ↑
Belongingness and love needs ↑
Safety needs ↑
Physiological needs ↑

Figure 1.2 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Pleasure ↑
Usability ↑
Functionality ↑

Figure 1.3 A hierarchy of consumer needs

Level 2—usability

Once people had become used to having appropriate functionality, they then wanted products that were easy to use. As discussed, this more or less represents the situation at the moment in many product areas: people are used to products that function well, but now they also expect usability. Having appropriate functionality is a prerequisite of usability, but it does not guarantee usability. The human-factors profession is now adept at contributing to the creation of usable products and has established a number of principles to which designs must adhere in order to be easy to use. The basic principles of designing usable products are outlined in An Introduction to Usability (Jordan 1998).

Level 3—pleasure

Having become used to usable products, it seems inevitable that people will soon want something more: products that offer something extra; products that are not merely tools but ‘living objects’ that people can relate to; products that bring not only functional benefits but also emotional ones. This is the new challenge for human factors.

Usability: vital but not the whole story

It is important to note that pleasure-based approaches to human factors are not an alternative to usability-based approaches. Although usable products will not necessarily be pleasurable, products that are not usable are unlikely to be pleasurable. Usability, then, should be seen, in many cases, as a key component of pleasurability. After all, what is the point of providing a user with a beautiful product with a vast array of functions if the design of the product makes it difficult to use to its full advantage? Nevertheless, usability-based approaches are inherently limited.

The reason why they are limited is that usability-based approaches tendto look at products as tools with which users complete tasks. However, products are not merely tools: they can be seen as living objects with which people have relationships. Products are objects that can make people happy or angry, proud or ashamed, secure or anxious. Products can empower, infuriate or delight—they have personality (Marzano 1998).

People also have personalities. Not only do they have personalities, but they also have hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations. These are liable to affect the way that people respond to and interact with products. Again, this may, prima facie, seem obvious. However, if a being from another planet were to try to learn about the human race via the human-factors literature he/she/it would probably conclude that we were basically little more than cognitive and physical processors. It is a rarity to find published human-factors studies that describe people in terms that go beyond factors such as age, gender, education or profession. Similarly, these studies only seem to be concerned with the level of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which people can perform tasks—not with their emotional responses to the products that they are using and experiencing. This approach is reflected in the International Standards Organisation’s definition of usability: ‘the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goals in particular environments’ (ISO DIS 9241–11).

It might seem that this line of argument is merely a semantic quibble. Surely, it might be argued, the satisfaction component of usability could cover the wider aspects of people-product relationships.

A review of the human-factors literature will make it clear that this is not a mere semantic quibble. The human-factors profession has traditionally operationalised ‘satisfaction’ in a manner that is limited to the avoidance of physical or cognitive discomfort. This is clearly reflected in the International Standards Organisation’s definition of satisfaction: ‘the level of comfort that the user feels when using a product and how acceptable the product is as a vehicle for achieving their goals’ (ISO DIS 9241–11).

This, then, is the problem with usability-based approaches—they tend to encourage the view that users are merely cognitive and physical components of a system consisting of the user, the product and the environment of use. The premise on which these approaches are based appears to be that the product must be designed such that the cognitive and physical demands placed on the users are minimised—that the demands do not exceed the person’s processing capacity. Usability-based approaches then encourage a limited view of the person using the product. This is—by implication if not by intention—dehumanising.

This seems ironic; of all the people involved in the product-creation process, it is the human-factors specialist, with his or her roots in behavioural science, who is the person that would be expected to have the richest understanding of the people for whom the products are being created. It is no longer sufficient for the profession to think of people in such limited terms. In order to fully represent, in the product-creation process, the people using and experiencing the product, human-factors specialists must take a wider view of person-centred design and look, in a more holistic context, both at product use and at those using and experiencing products.

Pleasure-based approaches: challenges for the new human factors

So far in this chapter it has been argued that human factors must move beyond usability in order to address the relationship between people and products holistically. This presents the profession with a number of new challenges that must be addressed in order to support such approaches. Perhaps the three major challenges are as follows.

Understanding people holistically

Meeting this challenge requires going beyond simply looking at the factors that influence how successful—in terms of task completion—a user-product interaction will be. In order to find a way into the wider issues of people-product relationships, it is necessary not only to have an understanding of how people use products, but also of the wider role that products play in people’s lives. Such an understanding is a precondition of being able to define a product benefits specification, which goes beyond the traditional usability-based user requirements specification.

Linking product benefits to product properties

Having established the different types of benefits—or ‘pleasures’—that people c...