So, are good ergonomics worth the time and/or cost associated with developing them? Absolutely! Good ergonomics are the gift that keeps on giving. But I’m an ergonomist so I’m probably biased.
Actually, I’m not biased. I became an ergonomist naturally, not through a scholastic choice or job availability. From an early age I saw the benefit of not just doing things the right way, but trying to make things better from the beginning. Much later I discovered that other people do the same thing and it has a cool name to go with it.
I believe good ergonomics are worth the effort of developing them which is why I do it. Furthermore I don’t believe in it because my heart tells me it is true, but because of cold, hard scientific evidence. Thousands of studies have been done showing that the benefits of developing good ergonomics greatly outweigh their costs.
Worker productivity increases over the last century are mainly due to increased education and ergonomics. Increased market share for new products are mainly a result of good user experiences which owe a lot to ergonomics. Reductions in skill levels to perform a task are mainly due to improved usability (a subset of, you guessed it, ergonomics). More compelling than those are the bad ergonomics.
It doesn’t take long to get frustrated with a poorly designed product or system. Those bad ergonomics don’t only destroy your productivity, but they can spoil your mood or ruin your day. If having bad ergonomics can provide such a profound psychological impact on the user, do good ergonomics do the opposite? Why yes they do.
People will get downright giddy when they pick up a new contraption and can operate it intuitively or they see how much better their life can be because of it (like my TiVo). Positive profound psychological impacts are always worth the cost. That’s how you get customers for life.
Still don’t believe it? Think of the last time you got terrible service at a restaurant. Even if the food was great you probably don’t want to go back to it. The bad user experience spoiled any of the positives about it.
But that’s not ergonomic, that’s dining out. Wrong, it is all ergonomics. The success of the system as a whole depends on the interface between the user and the product. The comfort the user has with the interface and the efficiency and accuracy with which they complete their task are all ergonomic factors. But you probably want a more concrete answer than this.
Ergonomics, Human Factors, Usability, Supportability and Logistics are some of the disciplines that share one major thing in common. To get the most out of them you have to do them early. Ninety-five percent of your total logistics resources should be spent in the first ten percent of the projects life cycle. The others are similar.
What that means is that if you set things up efficiently to begin with, you reap a whole lot of benefit from it over the life of the product or system. It also means that the longer you wait to develop it the more costly it will become. With the costliest thing of all being that if it is too hard to use, no one will use it.
