By Dr. David R. Roisum
Getting into a rental car recently, I noticed that to go forward you need to pull the console shifter backward, and to go backward you need to push the shifter forward. No wonder geezers occasionally get it wrong and back into a building or, worse yet, over their grandkids.
Even more puzzling was the windshield wiper control. Here to increase wiping you moved the column stick down and vice versa.
The problems illustrated here are far worse in consumer controls on household products and far, far worse on industrial controls. The cost of control confusion is not small if you consider that you pay for it every day for the life of the machine in terms of increased waste, delay and customer complaint. I have served as an expert witness in several cases where E-stop choices were, in part, responsible for increased personal injury on winding machines. This is the first clip in a short series on the much-neglected area of human factors in web=machine design.
Web201.51a YouTube clip link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCkDUBy_mKA
Getting into a rental car recently, I noticed that to go forward you need to pull the console shifter backward, and to go backward you need to push the shifter forward. No wonder geezers occasionally get it wrong and back into a building or, worse yet, over their grandkids.
Even more puzzling was the windshield wiper control. Here to increase wiping you moved the column stick down and vice versa.
The problems illustrated here are far worse in consumer controls on household products and far, far worse on industrial controls. The cost of control confusion is not small if you consider that you pay for it every day for the life of the machine in terms of increased waste, delay and customer complaint. I have served as an expert witness in several cases where E-stop choices were, in part, responsible for increased personal injury on winding machines. This is the first clip in a short series on the much-neglected area of human factors in web=machine design.
Web201.51a YouTube clip link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCkDUBy_mKA
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