Great UX, Ergonomic and Human-centred Product Design requires a deep and rich understanding of both the user and the context in which they interact with your product, service or experience.

To design a new product or service, you need to consider both quantitative and qualitative human factors research methods in order to get a deep understanding of the needs and behaviors of your users and in doing so develop user empathy across your entire Human Factors Engineering and Design teams.

This post highlights some of the Qualitative Human Factors Research Methods that can be used by Product Designers, UX Designers and Human Factors Engineering teams.

Human Factors Research methods for agile UX Design and Product Testing

One question people ask is whether human factors research is the same as UX research? Not necessarily. One of the primary goals of UX research is to understand everything about the user. This includes the human factors.

Often, User Researchers will conduct research for user discovery. Through generative research, insights, mostly qualitative in nature are drawn out from various techniques. The goal of discover research is to understand the user, empathise with them, and put the spotlight on how they feel and perceive a system or service.

It involves knowing about their lives. Who they interact with and how they behave in their own context and real life environments. This is integral to providing innovative solutions to real world problems. So, how do human factors fit into all this, and what is the difference?

The human factors component for UX focuses primarily on the human and the system. User Experience is interdisciplinary, and the human factors are often related to human-computer interaction (HCI). Before going any further, it is important to note that human factors is also a field in its own right and is strongly associated with ergonomics. Across the spectrum of UX however, human factors focus on how users interact with various components of a system. 

It involves capturing the degree at which users can perform tasks, retrieve information, and measuring how consistent the design and interface is for potential users. User testing plays an important role in our understanding of human factors and HCI in UX. Often conducted through controlled experiments with a researcher, User testing is effective. However, is it possible to uncover human factors using qualitative research methods?

The short answer is yes. As mentioned above, UX is interdisciplinary, and this includes user research and user testing. We often consider qualitative research as being a range of methods and techniques used during the user discovery phase of design.

What are some Qualitative Human Factors Research methods?

There are a number of various qualitative research methods that can be used in Human Factors.

The following sections introduce some of the various qualitative research tools that can be used as human factors research methods.

Diary Studies are a powerful Human Factors Research Method

One example is conducting human factors research using User Diaries also referred to as a UX Diary Study. First, what is a UX Diary Study? A user diary, or user log, is a descriptive account of user activities. Unlike quantitative surveys, user diaries are used to explore the thoughts, feelings, behaviours that are integral to UX and Human Factors design.

Bringing real world contextual insights into the design process and transformative for building empathy. This is the main reason why UX diary studies is becoming increasingly popular. This is primarily due to the integration of mobile and smartphone technology, and multimedia data.

Using Mobile Diary Study Tools users can now document diary entries with the use of photos, videos and mobile screen recordings to increase the contextual richness of their real world and digital experiences.

In terms of their interaction with a product or system and the human factors that need to be uncovered, a video survey can also be a powerful research tool.

User Journey Mapping as a tool for Human Factors Research and Product Testing

User Journey Mapping is also a powerful discovery research method for Human Factors.

Whether you are designing a physical device or a software application (or a combination of both i.e. an internet of things / smart device), at one stage or another, you need to understand the end to end user journey.

User Journey Mapping is a powerful human factors discovery research method.

As a user goes through the processes required for them to achieve a goal with a new product, application or system, Journey Mapping tools allow them to capture every stage of their user journey in context and in-the-moment. With smartphone enabled user journey mapping apps, users can record every real world and online interaction and immediately upload this to a researcher dashboard where their end to end journey is automatically mapped.

The added benefit of this is that Human Factors Researchers do not need to be present with their users. Research participants, i.e. users are not required to travel to a central location or lab to participate in this form of user research.

Using Mobile Screen Recording apps for Human Factors research

As smart devices and internet of things (IoT) becomes the norm in product design, there is an urgent need to be able to research both people interact with physical products or prototypes and the smartphone apps that power them.

Enter Mobile screen recording! When we talk about UX and human factors, the image often appears of users interacting with device and/or a mobile application. Of course this is not surprising, given that mobile apps and digital technology have grown rapidly over the past decade and a half. So mobile screen recording is a fantastic way for user testing to be conducted. More importantly, it is one of the most optimum ways for UX teams and researchers to draw insights on human factors for effective iterative design.

The benefits are similar to that of a UX diary study. The ability to conduct human factors research remotely, in the context of HCI, speeds up the research process, and is cost effective. Additionally, users have the ability to test and interact with a system without having the researcher present. It reduces a certain level of intrusiveness to it all.

Lastly, MSR (mobile screen recording), allows you to narrate. Although this is more central to user discovery and understanding how people feel about a product design or service - having the affordance of MSR means that you can integrate descriptive insights into the human factors process.

The overall conclusion to this is that the concept of human factors for UX design is not entirely restricted to the direct observations of human computer interaction. In fact, we should encourage our researchers and UX teams to align user perceptions with the components of human factors in UX design. Qualitative research can certainly help with this.

Our platform supports multiple Human Factors Research methods

Our human factors research tools have supported hundreds of human factors research projects covering everything from medical devices to voice assisted technologies to smart home systems.

If you’d like to discuss a specific human factors research method or are just curious to learn more, get in touch now.

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