From the category archives:

training

Human Factors Blog @ SXSW

by Richard Pak
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Anne was invited to be a panelist at SXSW on Friday, March 12 at 05:00 PM.  SXSW is a yearly music, movie, and interactive media festival held in Austin, TX.  The title of the interactive panel is With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The Future of Video Games. Here is a description:
Video games are more popular than ever, and [...]

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Careers in Human Factors & Aging

by Richard Pak

A graduate student contacted me with questions about career paths for those of us in HF with an aging background.  This sounded like a great opportunity for discussion so I’m posting it here.  If you can contribute responses to any or all of these questions, please leave a comment!
I am giving a presentation on the Aging Technical Group [of the [...]

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Redesigning Toyota’s Keyless Ignition System

by Richard Pak
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The LA Times reporters Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabedian recently wrote a story about keyless ignition systems and the associated HF issues (we blogged about it here).  In a follow-up story, they report that Toyota is considering redesigning the system so that instead of requiring a single 3-second press to shut off the engine, it now requires 3 consecutive [...]

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HF Graduate Programs: North Carolina State University

by Anne McLaughlin
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This is the second post in our 2-part look at some HF programs.  Rich’s post about Clemson’s program can be found here.

The psychology graduate program at NCSU in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A, boasts eight faculty in the Human Factors and Ergonomics specialization. This is in addition to the faculty in our sister program in Industrial Engineering and related faculty in [...]

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Keyless Ignition in Emergencies: Do you know what to do?

by Richard Pak
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This story in the LA Times illustrates several important HF/usability issues.  First, the  importance of knowing what the user knows before introducing new, seemingly “simple” technology, or changing the way they currently do things (in this case, what people know about ignition systems and how they start their cars).  Second, like the story about the alarms, it also clearly illustrates [...]

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HF Graduate Programs: Clemson University

by Richard Pak
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This is the first post in our 2-part look at some HF programs. Anne’s post about North Carolina State University’s program can be found here.
Did you know that Human Factors is not only a fun blog, but something you could get a graduate degree in?  The field is known by many names but they are the same, more or [...]

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When Users Complain: Blackboard

by Anne McLaughlin
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There is a great article over at Inside Higher Ed. describing what happens when a company without evidence of a usability process finally asks its users for feedback.
At an open “listening session” with top executives of Blackboard here Wednesday at the company’s annual conference, college officials expressed frustration with many of the system’s fundamental characteristics. At times, the meeting seemed [...]

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Time.com article on Anne’s research with Games & Aging

by Richard Pak
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Our own Anne McLaughlin was featured in a recent article in Time.com.  Anne and her colleagues Jason Allaire (NCSU) and Maribeth Gandy (Georgia Tech) were recently awarded a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study using games to moderate cognitive decline in older adults.
Their plan is to study what parts of games might help cognitive performance and [...]

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Emergency Checklists and Aviation

by Anne McLaughlin

The recent water landing into the Hudson is still being investigated. This AP article focuses on whether flight attendants were trained not to open the back door of the plane during a water landing, but the most interesting bit comes at the end:
Another concern is whether the FAA and airlines need to revise emergency procedures for pilots in the event [...]

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Game Players as Future Warriors

by Richard Pak

I heard an interview over the weekend on the use of robots in war. A fascinating bit from that story was that as modern warfare moves to soldiers manipulating robots from afar, the military leveraged the existing research and development of game companies in the design of hand held controllers (at 13:43 in the streaming interview).
So the predator drone [...]

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Return of the Checklist!

by Anne McLaughlin

Paper to the rescue again!
From the January 14th New York Times:
“Surgical complications are a considerable cause of death and disability around the world,” the researchers wrote in the online edition of The New England Journal of Medicine. “They are devastating to patients, costly to health care systems and often preventable.”
But a year after surgical teams at eight hospitals adopted a [...]

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Milk Jug Usability

by Richard Pak

A square milk jug has lots of benefits; because of its square shape, they stack more efficiently compared to existing milk jugs.  The shape makes it so that cartons of milk won’t require milk crates.  The net result is reduced transportation costs.
However, it seems they are not so easy to pour. According to the NYT article, training was required to [...]

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1960’s Human Factors : The Titan II Missiles

by Anne McLaughlin
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I went on a trip to Tucson over the holidays and toured the last Titan II missile silo. A brief history: from 1963-1982 these missiles were part of the cold war “peace through deterrance” and “assured mutual destruction.” In essence, they provided one reason not to attack the US: even were we destroyed, these missiles would still launch to destroy [...]

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Patient photos aid docs reading faceless CT scans – Yahoo! News

by Richard Pak

Here is a really neat study that found that adding a picture of a patient’s face on a CT scan caused doctors to be more careful when examining the images.  The researchers proposed mechanism for the effect is that the faces induced doctors to have more empathy for the patient which led them to more carefully analyze the images.  Whatever [...]

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Hospital Bracelets Face Hurdles as They Fix Hazard – NYTimes.com

by Richard Pak

New York’s 11 public hospitals are at the forefront of a national movement to standardize color coding of hospital wristbands to designate patient conditions, in which purple — the color of amethyst — means “Do Not Resuscitate.” Red, or ruby, indicates allergies, while yellow — call it amber — marks someone at risk for falling.
The goal is to prevent potentially [...]

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Inner and Outer Outed

by Anne McLaughlin

Redesigned Beltline signs to drop ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’
RALEIGH – No more “Inner” and “Outer” for Raleigh’s Beltline. Soon it will be Interstate 40 and Interstate 440, east and west.
The state Department of Transportation is about to make good on a long-standing promise to get rid of the Inner Beltline and Outer Beltline signs that get lots of motorists [...]

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