Dr. Ryan Urquhart joins HumanCentric’s Team

Dr. Ryan L. Urquhart has established himself as a researcher, engineer, educator and speaker. We are excited to announce that he has joined HumanCentric as a Senior Human Factors Specialist. Prior to joining HumanCentric, he was employed by International Business Machines (IBM), located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. While at IBM, his focus was providing human factors support for IBM’s WebSphere and Tivoli software brands. He currently has 4 patents pending as well as numerous publications and technical reports.

His expertise is in the area of human audition, noise and performance, speech intelligibility, and human-system interaction. His formal background is in Industrial and Systems Engineering with an emphasis in Human Factors Engineering. Over the span of 10 years, he has applied human factors principles to a variety of domains and clients, both in government and industry. Prior to joining HumanCentric, the list of clients he has worked with includes: Thomson Reuters, JP Morgan Chase, Sony Ericsson, Thomson Consumer Electronics, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Army Research Laboratory, to name a few.

Dr. Urquhart obtained his Doctoral degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a concentration in Human Factors Engineering. He received his Master’s and Bachelor’s Degrees in Industrial and Systems Engineering from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He’s a member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) and Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), where he serves as chairperson of the System Design Technical Group.

Learn more about Ryan on LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com/in/drryan

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Kroger’s ScanTunnel recognized as a Top Innovation at the National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show

Kroger’s new Advantage Checkout ScanTunnel was recognized as a top innovation at the National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show this January 2011. Throughout 2010 Kroger has been working with HumanCentric’s Usability Specialists, Industrial Designers and Graphic Designers in order to design all aspects of the ScanTunnel that are user-related. HumanCentric provided ergonomic recommendations for component layouts, customer and associate work flow analysis, product form factor options, and graphic signage in addition to observing shoppers and sales associates during the checkout process both with and without the ScanTunnel technology.

The final ScanTunnel design has resulted in a revolutionary new approach to Point of Sale and retail checkout that involves high speed imaging of bar codes or other identifiers to reduce labor costs and high speed conveyors send groceries through the checkout process in half the time.

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Lack of context awareness leaves me cold

My grocery store has moved the greeting cards section to the freezer aisle. Who buys greeting cards? Women. Who gets cold in grocery stores? Women. Seriously, the day I took this photo it was 70 degrees outside, but I brought a jacket with me just so I could put it on while I was picking out cards. If they want to encourage me shop in this area, they have made a big mistake. Did no one think about the users of this section of the store and how long it takes to pick out the right card? Must’ve been designed by a man.

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Electric Toothbrush & Function Allocation

Several months ago I bought my first electric toothbrush, and I have to admit that I’m in love. Not only is it a great toothbrush, but it’s a great example of a classic Human Factors design issue: function allocation between humans and machines. This is an issue that dates back to at least 1951 with Fitts Lists, and HABA-MABA lists, such as:

• Humans are best at (HABA) information retrieval using context and associations, machines are best at (MABA) information retrieval based on long lists and structured information.
• Humans are best at creative and adaptive tasks, machines are best at precise and repetitive tasks.

The lists change as machine capabilities change, but they are helpful when assessing a complex system and looking for places where machine automation can help, such as scanning barcodes at the grocery store instead of typing in prices, and where they introduce new problems, such as airplane pilots having difficulty staying awake during long flights because so many tasks have been automated. So how does this apply to my toothbrush?

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Don’t hold your iPhone like that!?!

I’m sad to say that my new iPhone has the same “death grip” problem as everyone else. If I hold it so that my hand bridges two of the three metal bands that encircle the device, the reception bars drop. It’s especially bad if you bridge a gap in the bands at the bottom-left corner of the device, right where it nestles into your palm if you hold it left-handed. What was Apple thinking, building the antenna into an exposed metal band around the edge of the phone?

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Recall Overkill

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is chartered with protecting the public from bad product design and recalls thousands of cribs due to the inability of some parents to follow directions. Now granted, often many designs and instructions for assembly are so bad as to be flagrant violations of all that is “design holy”, still three to four million cribs. And why, because a handful of children are injured, a smaller number die. Please don’t over-react. I understand the anguish of parents who lose a child or who are feeling guilty because their child was harmed or frightened.  I get the anger they feel in this day and age over desperately needing to find the right scapegoat. However, the penalty seems to vastly outweigh the crime here and the solution seems to be all wrong.

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When the Lights Go Out: An Infrequent but Lethal Road Danger

According to an article in the May 17, 2010 News & Observer, a young man died on the road between Pinehurst and Sanford near the intersection of US 1 and NC 42. The report indicated that he hit a car head-on in the northbound lane of US 1. The car he hit had no lights on according to witnesses. One witness said the car was stopped. The driver of the dark vehicle was also killed. The young man hit it at speed head-on, suggesting that the “dark” vehicle was heading the wrong way or somehow got turned around in the northbound lanes. The police told his father that “they doubted that he ever saw it.” What a waste. High school aged, football star, coming home from seeing his girlfriend at her home in Pinehurst. Gone in the blink of an eye.

Gone in the blink of an eye that could not see the danger ahead in the road. Even something as large as an automobile. Even though his car lights were working fine. While this blog opens with a tragic story, its point focuses squarely on issues of visibility, conspicuity, and night vision. When our highway speeds outrun our headlights, our vision at night fails to protect us. When an object is dark, our closing rates can preclude our ability to see, think, and react. The end result is often fatal.

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Moving on Up and Leaving the Coal Mines Behind

The Massey Upper Big Branch Coal Mine disaster which has dominated the news over the last two weeks raises a disturbing professional notion for me. In the late 1970s I was a student at the California State University of Northridge (CSUN) working with Dr. Mark Sanders trying to attain my Master’s degree in Applied Psychological Research/Human Factors.

My professor offered me a job working with him and his team on a project for the Bureau of Mines (BOM) which existed at that time to conduct health and safety related research in the U.S. mining industry. The team was designing and testing personal safety equipment for “low-seam” coal miners, e.g. helmet, kneepads, gloves. It proved to be a fun, if not thoroughly scary, adventure. It was also something else: it was true to the roots of human factors and ergonomics. It was work that was desperately needed and went to the foundations of human factors and ergonomics because it was intended to improve the quality of work life and safety for people who worked every day in dangerous, harsh conditions that threatened their lives in very real ways.

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Group Think and the Perils of Rule-Based Systems

David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times contributed an article to the Sunday News & Observer on March 21, 2010.  He wrote well of the contrast between individual thinking, person-to-person, perspectives and decision–making and what he called “group think.”  He points out that individual thinking is driven by the tendencies of fairness, embarrassment, social propriety, kindness, and an understanding for and defense of the “underdog.”  Group think, on the other hand, reflects our tendencies for “us v them” thinking and reflects historical shame fests such as the Jews v Nazis, Tutsis v Hutus, and Shiites v Sunnis.  The contrast, is brilliantly mapped onto our current political theatre, and, for many, is a truly scary scenario when taken to its logical extreme outcome.

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Fractions of a Second at the Olympics

When athletes are racing one-by-one instead of next to each other, the closeness of the results are a lot harder to perceive. To illustrate how close some of the results in Vancouver were, the New York Times created  cool interactive piece called Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical. Turn your speakers on and try the women’s speedskating 1,000-m.  Can you tell a difference between the top two finishers?

Even with both the audio and visual cues, the .02 of a second difference is impossible for me to distinguish. The physical distance separating the two Olympians would be a lot more meaningful to me. The fact that we are much better at distinguishing distance  is one reason why you’ll notice that consumer products such as turn-by-turn GPS units will use distance instead of time to inform drivers when they need to turn. Distance is tangible, whereas time is invisible and fleeting.

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