Title: Ergonomics for Interaction Designers: Parts 1-3
Context: Human factors isn’t just for industrial designers anymore.
Synopsis: Designing and building digital products has traditionally spared interactive user experience professionals from the considerations that the designers of 3D objects had to account for as a core part of their process. But, as digital products become transient and move from device to device, all with varying form factors, we digerati no longer have such luxury. Especially as natural user interfaces become more prevalent, so too must our rumination on the type of device and physical interactions that users will have when engaging with our products. This goes far beyond accessible design where we retrofit alternative access patterns into our core workflows. Now, place, input patterns, ergonomics, and device structure can all impact our primary use cases at the UI level. What this new reality really asks of our profession is an even greater investment in understanding a wider range of potential user personas as well as pre-design scoping of the extra-digital environments in which they might be used. The line between virtual and real is not just being blurred, it is being obliterated from a design standpoint. We are all anthropomorphicists now, whether we like it or not.
Best Bit: ???The most basic approach, if we can even call it that, is ‘Procrustus’, which means that no attempt to accommodate the user has been made, and the user must adapt to the product, however it happened to be designed. Incidentally, this term comes from Greek Mythology, where Procrustes was fitted to a bed by sawing off his head and feet.???