Engineering design is often used to steer the creation and development of products. The engineering design is a process taught and followed in most engineering departments throughout the country. Most engineering designs will place emphasis on 7 primary elements:

• Simplicity: the fewer the number of parts/complexity of parts, the better.

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• Manufacturability: how easy is it to recreate/mass produce the design.
• Solvability: does it solve the problem for which it was designed?
• Cost effectiveness (ROI): how much does it cost, over the long run, to manufacture?
• Ergonomics: maximizing productivity by reducing discomfort.
• Safety: Reducing the risk to the user by reducing any type of hazard to the lowest possible level.
• User-defined Specs: does is match the requests/needs/wants as made by the user?

What's missing from this discussion are usability issues:

• Efficiency: It should be easy for the user to accomplish the task the item is designed for. Are there 3 steps or 12? Does it involve multiple button presses or only one?
• Effectiveness: It should effectively accomplish the task it is designed for. The user should not have to continue the task with another item, or combine this item with another to accomplish the task.
• Satisfaction: The user should be satisfied with the result, and be confident in the result.
• Ease of learning: The item should be easy to understand and learn, which leads to being easy to use. It should not take the user much time to study the item before understanding how it works.
• Ease of remembering: Once learned, the process for using the item should be simple enough so that it is at least partially remembered and can be used again without forcing the user to re-learn the item.
• Visually pleasing: The items appearance should be inviting and stimulate the user into wanting to use it, or at least it should not detract the user from wanting to use it.
• Quick error recovery: If the user makes a mistake when using the item, it should be easy to recover from that mistake without starting the process over, or without losing a major amount of effort.

With these steps integrated into an engineering design, there is a better chance that a more usable product will be created and ultimately delivered to the end-user.

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Last update: 27-03-2009 13:48