Engineering Psychology in Systems
Engineering Psychology is an increasingly recognized
requirement for user-friendly, safe, efficient, and effective
systems... including our work in outer space for the Canadian Space
Agency. These can be machinery and control rooms, consumer products,
software, websites, and smart systems of every sort. Few organizations,
however, think it makes sense to have the necessary expertise
available in-house. Increasingly, communicating (or "interfacing")
with employees or users is being handled less as "art"
and more as "Human Factors" and ergonomics analysis.
Behavioural Team staff play a number of
roles in systems development including:
- full responsibility for market intelligence,
functional specification, Cognitive Architecture, and flow,
- for websites, applications, prototype development,
in devising usability testing, in planning and developing help,
the manual (and testing it for novice user comprehension), and
designing the beta-tests and debriefing the beta-test participants,
- behavioral advisors to design teams, and
as
- third-party design auditors.
Questions about users arise in all phases
of the design- and life-cycle of systems. Behavioural Team provides
a variety of services geared to the differing requirements of
the design cycle including:
- specification development based on market
research, "Product Space Analysis," and user needs,
- system design analyses (e.g. Task Analysis
and task allocation to people, groups, and computers) prototype
and web page design,
- testing and evaluation of equipment design
and individual and crew/team performance,
- usability testing and usability testing of
designs,
- information design and evaluation (e.g. control
layout, warnings, labeling),
- operations design and evaluation (e.g. workload),
- evaluation of organizational communications,
and
- training development and evaluation.
Behavioural Team has many resources to support this work:
- MIL-STD-1472 and other specialized Human
Factors standards, guides, manuals, and rules-of-thumb, and,
of course, secret information,
- software for rapid prototyping of user-computer
interfaces,
- access to human performance (usability) testing,
Focus Groups, and related videotaping and audio recording equipment
and observation room,
- with a track record that includes work on
consumer gear, voice information, Mondex, Internet sites, multimedia,
military, nuclear, aviation, transportation, and other systems,
Behavioural Team provides a key ingredient for successful systems.
But most of all, we have the experience to
do the job right the first time around.
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