• 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?

The toothbrush takes care of the aspects of brushing my teeth that a machine is best at.

• It vibrates the head of the toothbrush, moving the bristles across my teeth much faster than I could ever hope to do (machines are better at small, repetitive motions).
• It automatically stops after the ADA-recommended 2 minutes, so I keep brushing until it stops (machines are better at judging time).
• It has a special beep (really a brief change in the vibrating speed) every 30 seconds that lets me know when to switch quadrants, so that I don’t over- or under-brush different areas (again with the time).
• It even has a quick 1- minute mode for days when I’m in a rush to make sure I get at least some minimal brushing in, since humans are even worse at judging time when they’re stressed (machines don’t get stressed about being late).

That leaves me, the human, to focus on the things that I’m better at, like slowly moving the toothbrush and getting that brush head into the back corners of my mouth. I get better brushing coverage, since I’m not distracted by trying to also keep up the repetitive brushing motions (humans aren’t very good at doing multiple things at once).

Cleaner teeth and a quick lesson in function allocation. I love it!

There are some problems with consumer products that you don’t discover until people start using them. For example, I bought my iPad in April, but it wasn’t until June when I started wearing shorts that I realized that the metal back is really cold! However, this is a problem that the mobile phone industry has known about for years. It was one of the factors in moving from external to internal antennas; users like to rest a finger on the antenna while making calls, which greatly interferes with reception. It’s because skin is slightly conductive, which is exactly why Apple can use a capacitive touchscreen on the iPhone (instead of a resistive touchscreen, which requires pressure), and why you can’t use your iPhone with gloves on.

Using this external antenna was a carefully deliberated decision by Apple to achieve a particular look and shape. As a consulting company that works in product design, we are very aware that there are tradeoffs to be made between usability and design. In our own design process, we try to carefully balance aesthetics, fun, ease of use, and efficiency. You take into account how the product looks, how people react to it, how they use it, how many people will experience anticipated difficulties, and how severe these difficulties are. Not wanting to put a cold iPad on my lap? Not a big problem. Dropping a call because I’m holding my phone wrong? Huge! Apple is known for pursing elegant designs, which is why the front of the iPhone only has one button and their mice have none, but design should never come at the expense of basic functionality.

According to engadget, Apple’s suggestion is to hold the phone a different way. That’s ridiculous! It goes against one of our mottos in Human Factors and Usability, “fit the task to the person, not the person to the task.”  Or you can buy a case. This is why Apple has for the first time released their own iPhone cases, called bumpers, which insulate the band from your hand. I hear they’re selling like hotcakes. But I’ve never put a case on my iPod Touch, it’s too beautiful and thin, and certainly don’t want to cover up my lovely new iPhone. So now I have to choose between a phone with stunningly beautiful industrial design, or a phone hidden inside a case that can actually make calls. Completely ridiculous!

I’m sure that in a few weeks there will be dozens of companies offering their own cases and solutions, and hopefully some of them will be more elegant than the plastic bumpers from Apple. But shame on you, Apple, for giving design a bad name by creating a phone that forces you to choose between aesthetics and functionality! No one should have to make that choice.

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.

Along with cribs, we now see a recall of 3.4 million window shades by IKEA. Why? Because a child almost choked by having the cord wrapped around its neck. The agency says about 500 children have choked to death since the early 1980s. They estimate about one child a month dies. This is horrible, but design cannot replace the watchful eye of parents. Design recalls cannot replace the common sense and even “over-protectiveness” and “hyper-vigilance” parents need to exhibit for their infants and toddlers. There are far more creative ways for an infant or toddler to harm them selves than we think because we survived, probably due to our parents over-protective natures, when we were growing up.

Recalls have severe impacts on all the stakeholders. Manufacturers, distributors, retailers are all hurt, some even destroyed by such recalls. Consumers are often left with poorly designed and dangerous items because the cost of replacing them is beyond their means. e.g., cribs. The confusion, inconvenience, cost, and disruption of lives due to these mass recalls are manifest. Don’t get me wrong, those who knowingly and willingly introduce poor designs for profit sake, e.g., use of lead-based paint or tainted dry-wall from China, deserve retribution, but often recalls are based on oversights and unintended and unexpected consequences rather than intentional bad practices.

It seems to me as a human factor trained professional who works in product design, usability testing, and safety, that the CPSC and other agencies tasked to protect the consumers in this country have options. Quite simply, the CPSC should require hazard analysis, risk-analysis, and usability testing for all products deemed capable of harming a person. For example; chainsaws, power tools and products children and toddlers interact with should be tested.  Such requirements need to be enforced, especially for products made overseas and sold to the U.S. market. There are professionals and methodologies time-tested and true to accomplish that very goal. The fact that there are businesses, which do not use them, doesn’t mean a company should not be required to do so.

As John Wooden, historic coach of the UCLA basketball program, once said, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you ever have time to do it over.” These are truly sentiments of wisdom worth recalling.

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.

3M Corporation in the 1970s developed a product line referred to as “retroreflective” material. It was a fabric coated in a liquid which contained thousands of small hemispheric shaped “half” beads which possessed a mirrored concave interior. When struck by a light source, the hemispheric mirrored shape concentrates the light and actually reflects a more concentrated light back toward the source. As a result even poorly lit objects could be seen from much larger distances and the conspicuity of these objects is enhanced many fold. Conspicuity is different from visibility in the sense that an object can be made more conspicuous relative to other objects in the visual field. In other words, within the field of visibility, some objects become more conspicuous than others, thereby drawing our attention to them and increasing our awareness of them. All objects are visible, but some standout more. The beauty of this technology is that it exists in varying forms such as fabric and paint. It is cheap, time-tested, and true. More importantly, it is passive, requiring no energy source, no switch, no effort or workload.

Now to the point, we have all seen this technology on bicycles and baby carriages. We have seen it a thousand times on jogging clothes including jackets, shirts, and shoes. We have used it on highway signs, motorcycles, helmets, and even on the rear of truck trailers. Research demonstrated years ago that when retroreflective tape was used around the border on the rear of a truck trailer, following drivers could better judge their closing rate and adjust their speed or lane changes accordingly and more safely. I know something about this because in the 70s, I did research on coal mining that used different patterns of retroreflective fabric on miners’ suits to improve their conspicuity to equipment operators and each other in the mines. Today mining safety inspectors as well as other miners continue to use such materials on their coats and helmets.

Another positive aspect of the material is that it is cheap relatively speaking to other options for improving safety. How you might ask does this relate to the tragedy with which I opened this blog? How, in all these years, in a danger filled activity such as driving at night, have we decided that cars should have only “active” lighting systems? Why do car manufacturers not employ “passive” materials known to increase conspicuity and, as a result, safety in night driving situations. Here we have a technology that has been around for 40 years that improves visibility and conspicuity, increases attention grabbing characteristics of objects, makes drivers more alert to dangers, increases the distance at which drivers can effectively function at night. Something that has been in use for many years in highway related designs and yet, is not employed as a part of the required safety system in the design of automobiles.

Like the high mounted center tail brake light which immediately reduced rear collisions in traffic, such a simple and elegant human factored answer to the problem could easily be realized. Imagine that the young man had been able to see the car beyond his headlights, it glowed and attracted his attention, he slowed immediately, if for no other reason than curiosity, and he realized early enough that it was something in the wrong place at the wrong time, at all costs to be avoided.

Had automobile designers, manufacturers, and regulators employed such a low-cost, simple improvement as requiring the implementation of retroreflective paint on the automobile, perhaps one young man driving from Pinehurst to Sanford on a dark night in North Carolina would be still be alive.

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.

I am willing to bet that today most people, including human factors specialists and ergonomists don’t know much about “low-seam” coal mines. These are technically and officially mines in which the seams of coal are 48” or less in height. In fact, the seams can be as low as under 24” in height. In other words, the miners are prohibited from standing up straight. The conditions are also dark and dusty from coal and rock dust, gassy as evidenced in the Massey disaster with methane and carbon dioxide. While the days of using canaries as warnings of “bad air” may be past, “black damp” (conditions of low or no oxygen when a crew breaks through into an old uncharted mine) are not and can be a threat on a regular basis.  Low-seam coal mining involves shift work, working in poorly lit environments with big, powerful, and very unforgiving pieces of equipment, hard physical labor, and the threat of pieces of roof weighing four pounds to four tons, coming down on your head unannounced.

For many miners it is the only work available in regions where poverty and unemployment are common. Miners are born and bred with some families having produced lineages that go back several generations. I talked with miners who knew no other life and didn’t care to do so. Miners whose injuries kept them “up top” as they expressed a deep desire to go back under ground with their friends and co-miners.

One of the eye-opening activities involved in the project for BOM with Dr. Sanders was the opportunity to visit several mines in Eastern Kentucky east of Lexington. I got to see what small mines and large production were like. I got to experience a “long-wall” operation where a miner maintained 100-250 ton jacks holding the roof (make that mountain overburden) up while the grinder carved the coal off the face of the seam and literally “ate” its way out of the mountain. Oh, the terror virtually unnoticed by the miner and horrific to me, was that the miner and I had to stay under the legs of the jacks for protection as huge chunks, i.e., boulders fell from the ceiling and the mountain “settled” behind us. Trust me, there was nothing “settling” about any of it.

I got to ride six miles once in the scoop of a shuttle, designed to be less that 24” in height.  I rode with seepage dripping through the roof of the mine onto my face, scared to death that the ride might be my last.  I was in one mine given the “favor” of watching a “three-waller” in my honor.  This “three-waller” involved drilling six holes in a coal face, stuffing six sticks of dynamite into each hole with a blasting cap hooked by wire to an igniter worked by a older, i.e., survivor, miner in charge of blasting pulling a Red Flyer wagon full of dynamite and blasting caps and wire behind him as he crawled on his hands and knees. After setting off the 6 X 6 X 3 = 108 sticks of dynamite and the honor was complete, I couldn’t hear right for three days.

Working to improve the human factors of low-seam coal was hard. Miners don’t like change and mine owners and managers won’t pay for it if they can help it. It is not the case that miners are super-human fearless workers. They just learn to accept the “challenges”, overcome the fear, and do their jobs.  n such respects they are similar to soldiers.

My point centers around the fact that unlike soldiers who receive research and design attention every day from agencies and companies throughout the country, miners do not. Oh, there are companies out there like J.H. Fletcher of Huntington, WV, who work hard to improve their equipment (roof bolters) for both safety and productivity. Otherwise, there are probably at most a hand-full of human factors researchers and designers and ergonomists in the U.S. today who have even been in a “low-seam” coal mine much less worked on projects to try and improve the miners’ lot in life.

The disaster at Massey’s mine reminded me of this. The mines are hard, dirty, scary, and not a place that attracts highly educated people out of universities. Miners can be distant and mine managers, shift foremen, and mine owners like Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey, could care less about improving safety in lieu of digging coal. So over the last thirty years, we just abandoned them. We left and found cleaner, easier things to do like design websites and equipment and process for other environments like automobiles, hospitals, and shopping malls. Don’t get me wrong, medical human factors and ergonomics work is important, saves lives and careers, and improves the quality of life. But we are drifting into an age when most of our efforts do not focus on those who need us most. Miners, farmers, commercial fishermen, factory workers, process plant workers, and construction workers are just some of the professions that need our attention. Unfortunately most of us grew weary of rolling that particular rock up those particular ramps… and over time we took our science, methods, technology, and perspective home and gave up on the dirty, dangerous industries, because we got dirty and they scared us.

And then Massey and 29 human lives lost at the Upper Big Branch Mine had to come along and remind us.

The concept of “Group think”, however is even more ominous when viewed in the inevitable context and outcome of another psychological (human factors) principle developed and expressed by a researcher and human behaviorist named Jens Rasmussen, a European, Danish specifically, who proposed and wrote elaborately on a structure of human performance based on skill-rule-knowledge distinctions.  The focus and connection here is the level of performance based on “rule”-based behavior.

Under “rule”-based behavior, people perform tasks based on consistently applied sets of rules, procedures, policies, perspectives, and philosophies that dictate specifically how they will act and react, interpret and define, situations.  The problem with such perspectives and approaches is that they often represent an inflexible, externally controlled thinking that feeds into “group think.”   In effect, the person abandons their owns perspective and decision-making capability in favor of the established “rules” of engagement in order to avoid the typical accompanying game I refer to as “bet your license.”   Under this set of rules, if you think differently, decide on your own, think outside “the box”, and are wrong (or perceived to be) you lose your job, reputation, or life.

I have long complained about our tendencies to move in this direction because we are creating an almost endless file of bad decisions, an enormous set of examples of people in positions of responsibility who will not, or worse, cannot, apply their training, experience, or pure intelligence to situations and, hopefully, innovate our perspective as a group in some enlightening way.  Now we must answer the question being begged, “Why?”

Unfortunately we are too often led not by the “best and brightest” but rather by the hobgoblins whose little minds prefer rules and policies that provide a false sense of consistency, conformity, and removal of responsibility based on our ability to place blame for mistakes elsewhere.  As we have so often heard, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  Ignore the connection between people and guns or blame it on the intent of forefathers who made the rules and then conveniently died centuries ago.  A more modern day example that hits home is to examine the rules that govern our members of Congress regarding their benefits, retirement, and behavior.  It doesn’t take long to see how convenient and beneficial “rule”-based performance can be and the disasterous “group think” behaviors such philosophies generate.

Mr. Brooks is dead-on in his observation but the foundation of group think is based on the far more insidious need to “pass the buck” and avoid responsibility.  Think about it the next time Congress gives itself a raise by citing the needs of the remainder of the bureaucracy and military, the laws passed by others lawmakers years ago, or the clever rule that allows raises to be passed by “Not” voting for them directly so you look like a better, less greedy leader.

Group think and rule-based behavior.  A recipe for the destruction of America.

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.

There are so many things that could have made this better: write with a marker, stick it to the middle of the screen, cover the screens with paper, perhaps even turn off the broken screens, if that’s not too much to ask? When something like this happens at home or in a small office everyone just knows to ignore it, but in a public setting a sign like that has to scream so that even idiots like me will notice it.

So again I ask myself, why is it so difficult to install one of these seats? Let’s ‘human factorize’ this process so that users can be confident that their bundle of joy is safe in his/her seat. Some thoughts off the top of my head…

• Clearly mark all connection points (i.e. where the seat belt needs to be).
• Use color to help draw attention to these areas.
• Give the user some feedback to let them know when the seat is properly secured (a healthy click or snapping sound should do it).
• Include clear, simple instructions with graphics to help illustrate.
• Give the user some sort of safety check that will ensure that the car seat is properly installed in the car.

To be fair, I don’t have any kids and have never had to install one of these seats. So, if you think that I am being unfair or you have some other improvement ideas, I would love to hear them.