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What Makes a Product User-Friendly?Why are some products and systems more user-friendly than others? A new book by a University of Toronto engineering professor Kim Vicente called "The Human Factor" seeks to explain this apparent design malfunction.
Today's electronic gizmos have incredible features, but it often seems like you need an advanced degree to use a video recorder or a mobile phone. The high-tech capabilities are there, but the designs lack what Kim Vicente calls "human-tech," technology designed with the eventual user in mind. One way to improve that, he explained, is to bring users into the design process at the beginning. He points to one man who did that: famed electric guitar maker, Leo Fender.
"It's not that he was a guitar player," he explained. "He was actually a radio repairman. So what he did was, he followed a human-tech design process by involving musicians early on in the design process, trying to find out what their needs are. So for example, one of the things that he found was that in the original guitar design, the body was at right angles, so it actually bruised the guitarist's ribs as he was sitting down, playing the guitar. So one of the things they wound up doing was changing the shape of the body to conform to the shape of the guitarist. And it fits seamlessly now, r
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April 28, 2004 | Viewed 21,991 time(s)
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