What is human factors engineering and how does it augment product development? Bryant, VP of Human Factors at Research Collective, walks us through this data-driven world.
Pipeline Design & Engineering partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, or automation equipment but don’t have the bandwidth or resources internally to develop that equipment. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com.
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
What is human factors engineering and how does it augment product development? Bryant, VP of Human Factors at Research Collective, walks us through this data-driven world.
Pipeline Design & Engineering partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, or automation equipment but don’t have the bandwidth or resources internally to develop that equipment. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com.
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Welcome to the being an engineer Podcast. Today, our guest is Brian Foster, who is VP of human factors at research collective. Brian, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Bryant Foster:Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Aaron Moncur:Cool. So, Bryant, let's see, I just mentioned VP of human factors, he works at a company called research collective. And he's held several positions in the past, from from Google to faculty member at ASU. And now to his current position here at research collective. Bryant, so I'm an engineer. And I've worked with a lot of engineers over the past 1520 years. And I have actually never worked with a human factors designer or scientist. And I think that that's probably the case for a lot of engineers out there. Can you just maybe spend a couple of minutes going over? What is the field of human factors? What did you guys do? And we'll just start start there.
Bryant Foster:All right. So see, I mean, human factors, a lot of times there is positions, called Human Factors, engineers, or usability engineers. It's a little bit of a misnomer, I think, though, you know, because it's, we definitely don't follow a lot of times the typical engineering, schooling and background. So most people that get into human factors. Well, there's, you can come in kind of, from a lot of ways, but there's a few that are kind of the main paths into human factors. One is psychology. So people studying psychology, they like learning about people and how we learn and how we make decisions, and you know, our abilities and limitations, they like learning about that stuff. And then they when it comes time to kind of figuring out what kind of career there could be in this, you know, counseling is always the one that comes to mind first. And so if you're, you don't want to do that, you find out, there's a lot of different things you can do with psychology, and one of them is applying these things we know about people to the design of products. And so that's, you know, that's kind of how I did this. I did a bachelor's degree in Spanish, didn't really want to teach Spanish or didn't know what I was gonna do with that, but ended up finding about finding out about human factors went through a psychology program at Arizona State that specialized in this. And that's kind of how I got into it. Other people will come in through design, so if they're interested in design, maybe they're real talented in that. And then they kind of get real excited about, okay, how do I make my designs really user friendly or usable. So they kind of will focus then on human factors or usability. And then the other is engineering, a lot of times, especially in medical devices, biomedical engineers, will, you know, kind of pick up on this, and sometimes even once they're in their career, kind of switch over and start focusing on human factors or sometimes while they're in school. But those, you know, and it's nice, because in the field, we now have backgrounds for people with different skill sets. And so you know, you've got some engineering knowledge, some real heavy, you know, psychology design, and all of us, at the end of the day, our main, the thing that gets us most excited is applying what we know from one of these fields to people, and how, how people are going to end up interacting with the things that are being made.
Aaron Moncur:Cool. So when I used to think of human factors, I naively probably just thought, ergonomics, you know, fit well in someone's hand. Basically, what you're saying is that human factors is a lot more than just ergonomics, there's this human psychology and involved Is that Is that accurate?
Bryant Foster:It is. Yeah, so ergonomics is another kind of area and it depends a lot of times where you are in the world. Sometimes they're, you know, in the Europe, they might use ergonomics, more than the US. Ergonomics tends to be kind of associated now more with physical design, and a lot of times like office design, chairs and equipment. But it's another area that's just interested in Designing for the fit, proper fit with the people that are going to be using the products.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, cool. I read on this on your LinkedIn page, something that that I wanted to read here and maybe get some feedback from you because it sounded like a really cool project. So what it says is, this is one of the roles that you had in the past, collected emplacement recognition of improvised explosive device knowledge from US Army unmanned aerial vehicle sensor operators to design a realistic scenario based training simulation. There are so many really cool words in there. Can you tell us a little bit about about that experience and what you did there?
Bryant Foster:Yeah, that's interesting, I hadn't read that in a long time. Probably trying to sound cooler than I then actually was more or so the, it was actually a really cool project. Right? When I started grad school, I, I was able to join up with a team that was working with the army, based in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, doing working with a team that flew drones, the unmanned aircraft. And so our focus was, you know, a lot of times it's on the technology, and how to make the drones, you know, faster, quieter, all these sorts of things. And there's a lot of work that goes into the pilots that are actually flying these. And we were looking at, you know, what are the cues that the pilots are looking for when they're scanning, you know, an area. So we interviewed a lot of these pilots down at Fort Huachuca, and found some really interesting things about kind of the these little cues, they would pick up on that, you know, you or I an untrained eye would not even notice, but things with, you know, a car being positioned a little bit differently one day to the next, or, you know, a door that's open, that usually isn't, or some just crazy little things, and they would pick up on these things and be able to tell if these were threats. So what we did was made a simulation, that they could kind of fly over simulated. And we track we used eye tracking to look at where they looked in that in their field, to help us kind of augment what we learned from them in our interviews, to see, okay, are their gaze patterns, you know, when they're tracking and looking at these areas, kind of matching up with what they're saying the things they're attending to. And so we were able to create heat maps with these eye tracking charts, and see really some interesting things when you look at, you know, what a trained pilot looks at compared to one of the students that we had run through it, very different patterns. And, and kind of the other things that we're attending to.
Aaron Moncur:That is very cool. And it brings up another question. You mentioned, like data, you know, eye tracking software and gathering that kind of data. How much of a role does data play in humans factors, as opposed to? I'm not even sure what what to call it just kind of subject is subjective observation.
Bryant Foster:Yeah, so great question. And we try to use it more and more, especially as technology improves. But, you know, if you if you look at the way you can learn about how someone interacts with something, or their experience with it, you can interview them. And that's pretty popular, and, you know, like market research and things, focus groups, you know, one on one discussions, interviews, and, you know, they can tell you a lot about what they like, what they don't, you know, what's good and what's bad. But if you rely only on that, you miss out on some of the things that you can get by watching them use product, because it might be that they've developed, you know, they're experienced, and now they've developed some work around that to them now is very easy. But you would, you would not want to necessarily put that in the hands of someone who isn't experienced. And so maybe there's some things you can learn about how to improve that for the naive user. So then we would add in, you know, observation and performance to that. Another area would be the eye tracking, so or any type of biometric things like heart rate variability, the galvanic skin response, so, you know, it's the technology used in lie detectors, we sweat a little bit in our fingertips and our toes and kind of everywhere, when when we're stressed or our you know, our workload is going up or we're using you know, brainpower. So if you use those things, along with your observations and your interviews, you can see, okay, you know, are their, their biometric data matching up with kind of what we're hearing, and sometimes they don't. And when those times happen, it kind of requires further analysis a little bit deeper dive into what's really at play here, maybe it's nothing important, but at least you know, what they're saying isn't always matching up with what's going on physiologically.
Aaron Moncur:And what kind of tools to use to measure those things. I mean, we talked about eye tracking software, you mentioned that, you know, a small amount of perspiration on fingertips, things like that, what other kinds of tools are, are used to measure that data?
Bryant Foster:So, for eye tracking, there's two main methods. One would be what's called a remote eye tracker. And this would sit at the base of a, maybe a graphic interface, computer screen, something like that. It has cameras that point back at the eyes, and it's measuring or picking up on, you know, where the eyes are looking on that display, it requires calibration, to kind of tell it okay, how big of a display is it? Is it tracking? So that's one. Now most often, we will use glasses that do the same thing, they have cameras that point back at the eyes, and also out to the, to the field of view. So we've done we've used glasses on for studies related to like motorcycle riding, and seeing, you know, where do people look as they ride a motorcycle. And that's another one of those things where you see, you know, expert riders looking at different things, and having different Cape gaze patterns than novice riders. Others would be, you know, there's always EEG, which you know, is the head goes on the head and requires, you know, really short hair to be very effective. And so we don't use that very often. But that's another good way to see kind of workload. Heart Rate Variability might be, we have a watch that we use that tracks heart rate. And so it looks for, you know, your, your dips and peaks and valleys in your heart rate, at certain times when we're presenting stimuli, as well as the galvanic skin response, which a lot of times is something you wear on your finger. And it will track the the response that the body's response to workload or stress that way wasn't the main tools that we've used.
Aaron Moncur:That's, that's fascinating. I had no idea that there were so many tools you could use for this kind of human factors, data acquisition, it sounds I mean, it, you could almost use this stuff for some kind of a interrogation. In fact, I bet that, you know, law enforcement professionals use some of this stuff as well.
Bryant Foster:Yeah. And that's really what the lie detector test is. It's tell it's showing, you know, are you having some sort of physiological reaction, that that's different than your baseline, and that what they're detecting is a lie. In those cases,
Aaron Moncur:and the glasses, those sound really cool, they look back at your eyes and track your eye movements? Are they very big? Or do they just look kind of like normal glasses,
Bryant Foster:they, there's a few different types. The one we use is made by a company called Toby to be AI. And they are, they're probably one of the biggest players out there in an eye tracking especially. But yeah, they're, they kind of have a thicker rim and the glatt the, the lenses, or sorry, the cameras are usually like on the bottom and pointing back at the eye. And there's one up in the center, but cameras are so small. Now, the these used to be really obtrusive. But now they're, they're pretty awesome. And people wearing them, they don't really seem too bothered by them. You can put a lens in them or they can even be lens without a lens. If you're if you're just you know in a lab or something like that,
Aaron Moncur:how cool. I was looking on your website and I saw the terms human factors, scientists and user experience designers, can you talk a little bit about what what's the difference between those two roles? I
Bryant Foster:love this question. So, in theory, there should be very little difference between them. There, there seems to be more of a gap as time goes on, as some people focus more on kind of the touchy feely parts of design and a lot of times There enrolls at more technology companies, design companies as a user experience engineer. And a lot of times, I'll refer to them doing things, you know, on graphic user interfaces, more so than hardware products. And then human factors is really common in aviation, medical devices, and other areas where people would be working a lot on hardware, or systems. And, and those would be more human factors, engineers, a lot of times they have the same training, it might just be where they ended up kind of the path they took in their career. And the the way their particular field classifies their work.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, thanks for sharing that. How does the company know that that they need human factors research? Is there? Are there some triggers? Like if I'm an engineer, and I'm working on the design of new product? Is there some kind of trigger that I can be aware of to think to myself, Oh, hey, this is probably a point at which I should pull in Human Factors scientist or user experience designer? It's,
Bryant Foster:yeah. Is it? That is there a point at which, you know, I would say, the tough part about it is what what happens a lot of times, in the work that we do it, it seems like common sense. And a lot of times it is I mean, it's it's like, okay, if you're designing something for, you know, an elderly user, we'll make sure that you're using, you know, good contrast on your display. And your font, your your typeface is large enough to be seen. And, you know, okay, super easy, common sense. But what happens a lot of times is people forget to even ask that first question of, okay, who are we designing for here? And sometimes that, you know, just going through that process of, so our typical, you know, engagement would be coming in saying, Okay, who are your users? Where are they using the product? What other kind of circumstances that they're using the product in? And just asking those questions we find so often people, you know, within an organization, maybe there's a couple people that are involved in this, and they're looking at each other, and they're like, well, it's these people, and then they're like, oh, but there's those people or, you know, oh, but not those people. And so it just, it just kind of helps everyone understand or start to think about, okay, who is using this? Where are they using it? So, you know, I think it's nice early on? Of course, I know people are, the budgets are always a question. And so you don't want to, you know, bring in someone if you if you don't have to, but I think it is helpful, just just like you would you know, if you're designing something that needed electrical engineering, you know, a mechanical engineer could probably figure it out. But if you just were like, I just know, an electric, electrical engineer does this and in their sleep, let's just, you know, let that person come in and handle this, or at least consult with us and tell us do we need to? Is it worth having an electrical engineer here? Or should we just do this part? And then bring them in later at a different point?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, because another important factor is Time is money, right? Sure. Maybe maybe a mechanical engineer could fumble around and figure out the Human Factors things, but how long? Is it going to take him or her? Maybe it takes them two months to figure out what what your team could figure out in a matter of days or a week or something?
Bryant Foster:I think so. Yeah. And we see that night. The other area, I just have to say is the if for medical devices, and you're involved in medical devices. You know, the FDA has really started to push this more and more. And so, you know, there's, we don't want people to be surprised when they go to the FDA with a new product. And now the the FDA saying, Okay, do you have human factors testing or usability testing as part of your submission? And, and so that that ends up being a fairly decent marketing arm for us as well?
Aaron Moncur:Are you seeing that as more and more common part of the 510 K submission for FDA approval?
Bryant Foster:Absolutely. Yeah, it's, um, it's more more a part of it. And the agency, you know, is definitely not consistent for it. And, but like, a lot of times, it's all related to risk. And so if you have risks, you know, potentially harmful things that could happen if people misuse your product, then they're going to want to see that you've conducted some sort of usability testing, to demonstrate that people can use your product without insurance. During these harmful users,
Aaron Moncur:there's so many more questions. I think that that people might have about this. We obviously don't have an unlimited amount of time here today. So if people want to get in touch with you and learn a little bit more about how you might help them with their design and human factors, what's what's the best way for people to get in touch with you and research collective?
Bryant Foster:So yeah, our website is research, hyphen, collective.com. Research dash collective. If you go there, you'll see a little bit about us. My email address is Bryant br y. AMT at research dash collective.com.
Aaron Moncur:Perfect. Great. Well, Brian, thank you so much for being on the show and sharing some human factors wisdom with us. Super interesting stuff. And I guess that's it for me. Unless there's anything else that you want to say before we end the call.
Bryant Foster:No, nothing else for me. Appreciate you having me on. Best of luck in this and glad to glad to be a participant.
Aaron Moncur:Cool. All right. Well, thanks so much, Brian. Thanks there. I'm Aaron Moncure, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a positive review. It really helps other people find the show. To learn how your engineering team can leverage our team's expertise in developing turnkey custom test fixtures, automated equipment and product design, visit us at test fixture design.com Thanks for listening