Welcome to The Human Odyssey, the podcast about Human-Centered Design. The way humans learn, behave, and perform is a science, and having a better understanding of this can help improve your business, your work, and your life. This program is presented by Sophic Synergistics, the experts in Human-Centered Design. So let's get started on today's Human Odyssey. Hello and welcome to The Human Odyssey Podcast.
I'm your host, Rashod Moten, and I'm joined here today with my guest, Dr. Jennifer Fogarty, as well as my colleague and friend, Jaelyn Kelly. At least I like to think we’re friends, but, today's topic will be human decision making and the impact that human factors has in decision making.
And, you know, as I was thinking about today's topic I mentioned before, you know, we were going to go through the background, or to speak about the background work that goes on with cognition and how humans get to the decision making process and work through that process. But, we had something come across our team yesterday, and it made me rethink the entire process and discussion.
And what I actually want to speak about today is how human factors impacts specifically design, decisions within design, as well as, prototyping just the entire iterative process when it comes to designing and engineering. And again, instead of speaking specifically about, you know, the cognitive processes what I want to start with is just you know, in our everyday lives, you know, we work with, many teams. We see the iterative design process daily.
How would you guys, I guess, describe human factors within that process? And I'll start with you, if that's okay. Sure. So a little bit about my background, not a formally trained human factors person. Right? So I'm formally trained, if I were to use formal in that sense, in, you know, human physiology, right? And in human function, watching behaviors, but always I’m trying to understand kind of the biological premise for it. and it's a lot about stimulus, right?
When we think about how we react to our world, whether it be through a vision or hearing, or sense of touch, but also through pressure and oxygen, you know, and then what do you, what is your body trying to accomplish in space and time? But what I did learn and through working with human factors people, human systems integration, Human-Centered Design, like the very thoughtful decomposition of the environment you're expecting someone to be in to accomplish a goal like do a task, do work.
And that applies, again, to our everyday lives. Like, but we take a lot for granted. I think, you know, in terms of how, almost reflexive things have become because we've been accustomed to the environment, we're in and how that environment functions with us. I mean common things like a doorknob, you know, like you reach for it, you turn it.
It's not a real, it's not a thought process, for instance, like at the spinal reflex level, like there's not a lot of, white matter going on in terms of decision making anymore. But I think, what helped sensitize me to understanding that we have an opportunity to do better, not just assume what we have, going back to your point of, like, iterative design and the iteration to be on the order of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years or centuries.
We work on a scale with a lot of our customers that are probably on the days and weeks level of iteration as you get new information and into something, but still common everyday things. And going back to when I became more aware of what I took for granted, was actually having a child and watching them for the first time, and how they explore their world and learn from that exploration process.
But because, like the doorknob pre-dated them, like that thing was there and they learned it, they learned to function with it. And or it was guided by us and other people in our lives. But there's other things.
What has always bothered me about the concept of even simple things, like a door that we take for granted, when you go to a place of business and where the handle is and how the handle is positioned actually infers the way you interact with it, like so, a bar across the door, say almost at center level is a, is instinctually something you grab and push and that's fine if the door is designed with respect to your position to be pushed like either going into a business or coming out, it's
usually coming out of some, a room or something into an open space. But oftentimes, like someone put the bar on the door horizontally and it's a pull. So the signaling. So I think that is one where like there's decision making going on.
But in the, in this case, because the way we open doors is kind of given to you when you arrive in the world and then experience your world from the earliest moments of being a human that later when you run into, and literally they haven't run into the door, but when you now experience someone setting up this interface to be counterintuitive. And that, again, is cognitive dissonance. Like you will you put your hands on something and be like, I don't understand why the door won’t open!
And I have a PhD [Untranscribable due to laughter] to be standing at an entrance to a room or a building and be like, I don't understand why this isn't working! And it's like, oh, because you were supposed to do this other thing with it. And you're like, okay, so if you wanted me do this other motion, you just had to put the bar vertical or put a knob on it. You know, somehow how do I actuate this experience.
So while we can laugh about it, you know, like in the realm of, an austere and extreme environment, like spaceflight it is a big deal to set up an interaction with something, in terms of decision making and, and what, what was either, like, trained in you from a very early period of interacting with things versus something you specifically trained for, for your occupation. So now we deal with things like hatches and hatch opening.
You know, opening cabinets and drawers, but they have to be built differently because they need to stay closed. Right? You can't just gravity is not there to help you. So we have to do things differently. But then you have to say have I created a barrier to the thing you already know how to do that's going to create a conflict? That cognitive dissonance, and you're going to struggle with this simple task. And that struggle may lead to something that's a little more serious. Right?
Especially we always say like under emergency circumstances is when you get into a situation where not understanding how this thing you've taken for granted all your life operates, you can't get it opened and it's a problem, like buildings on fire. If the emergency egress is not set up in a very intuitive fashion, you say intuitive meaning we understood how you think about things from the get go, it can be a very hazardous problem.
And I've been in recently in a discussion about that situation from a business perspective of someone wanting waivers and exceptions, because it's convenient for them. They don't have the money and a variety of things that make sometimes being compliant hard, but the other side of the discussion is not being compliant. How does that change the risk of the really bad thing happening? and is there good transparency about awareness about that new, that risk that you're now engaging in?
because you tend to be hyper focused on the thing you want, not the thing, you know, the unintended consequences of what's going on. So I have totally had to rethink over the 20 years I've been in business, like how to be more aware of what is a sense and response situation and when we're using kind of ingrained behaviors to operate, in our world versus very specifically retraining that is done to operate more safely, more efficiently and more accurately.
And the difference between those, that if you want something to be easy, low overhead, you know, again, on almost a reflex level, you got to go with what is the common trained behavior. If you're trying to do something or you have to do something because of the, you know, the environment of use or the task that you're trying to drive to, not only are you going to have to identify that, but then you have to identify how you get there.
Like sometimes it's a mitigation, but really it's like maybe you have to own the fact that procedures and training have to come into play to make that a successful environment for the human to function. Yeah. And to your point, actually, as far as designing, just to have it be almost intuitive. and going back to knobology, well, on doors, funny enough, went to a meeting months passed, and it's at a hospital, right?
And one of the, the room we’re meeting in, mind you, we’re in the middle of a hospital, room we’re meeting in, we're standing in front of the conference room we're going to be walking into. And there's a rail on the door, on both sides of the door. I watched three people try to push and pull this door, look around to make sure everyone saw this. Do it again. Three people did the same thing, and then finally someone who worked at the building, they came and said, oh, these are sliding doors.
So these doors slid. These are complete full pane glass doors. And like the entire room front of the room, they're all glass. And there was no indication that this was a sliding door at all. Every single person thought it was push or pull, and in my mind I'm thinking, this is a hospital you need to build in accessibility. [Laughter] That environment, you know, as a specific example, like.
Yeah. It is like you just sit there and that's been, you know, our whole area that we need to continue to populate was like when design goes bad, design goes badly. Like, you know, oftentimes it's like, well, from a construction standpoint and cost standpoint, those were the doors that were left over or easy. [Untranscribable due to laughter.] You step back, those are good. Where are they the right choice? Probably not. But yeah helping people like that and again it's just one step away.
Like if there's an emergency in the room, if someone, like this was under calm circumstances, these people were frustrated trying to figure out how to operate a door to get in or out of a room, and you're like, can you only imagine under non-calm circumstances what that's gonna look like? So trivially, I think, you know, if you were like, oh, I don't care what doors you put in, but you’re like but you do. You know, and you really have to.
And that's kind of to me, human factors is the very is the field or discipline that is going to drive a very deliberate evaluation of an environment to identify where choices have been made that either facilitate your goals or do not facilitate those goals and then the next level of, well, what do we do about that? And you know, people get a lot of, up in arms like, you know, almost like an audit function or something.
But in the iterative design world, it is really proactive in terms of trying to transparently say, like, you can make any choice you'd like, but you should certainly understand the ramifications of those choices. To me, you know, this concept of willful ignorance like, well, I didn't know that would happen. I'm like, well, it was knowable.
There's many times where it was, if you had done the hard work and, you know, had, a diverse group of people in the room to make, you know, the observations from their perspective, which to your point, people with varying abilities or disabilities, to understand the world from their view of in a wheelchair, on crutches, with a cane, you know, whatever it might be, the permutations of it that, like that is not how I experience the world. So you should know.
And in spaceflight now, you know, we've become accustomed to, you know, the prototype of the person we think has gone and should go -ish. But opening the door to people of different abilities and different capabilities, that are going to be experiencing this. And now we need to bring them and they are now, you know, the user groups that have to start to experience environments or mock environments and say, well, how do you experience this world?
It’s used to work for a trained government astronaut who was doing this for a career, probably had ten years, you know, selecting criteria was pretty rigorous. And then ten years of training or and millions of dollars invested in them to become a trained asset. Yeah. And, the other situation is that is not the case for the commercial spaceflight endeavor. So get them in, help them, you know, get the feedback.
Because I don't even think for some of us who've done this professionally for a long time, I'm willing to admit, I can't anticipate what they're always going to struggle with or not. Yeah. So we just have to start really helping them experience where it is and get the data on it. And early as early as possible. Early and often. Jaelyn same question to you. So Jenn hit all my points wonderfully. That's fair.
But just as I think what really caught my eye, ear, whatever sense that happened to go through while you we're talking is like I really live in like the what do we do about that? That's been my last couple of months, especially iterating. much like Jenn, I'm trained in human physiology, but I do have a background in physics, so my comedy, I guess, my comedic experience has been, what do we do about that? About the human, do you want the physics? Or do you want the physiology?
Because they're both going to touch at some point. And that's where you get your really good, really reflexive solution that is beneficial to both parties. However, you know, the comedy ensues when the human physics and the design physics don't line up but that's, again, she hit all points. It was great. I was enraptured. We have talked before. We have talked before. And given a lot of our common training.
But I think, it has been helpful, especially in our company and even when, Cynthia, the founder and CEO, and I have worked together like, it was really beneficial to have those capabilities on board to me, at least the observation so we had a chance at designing the test to go pursue, why did that matter? And to your point, like, we're trying to get some solutions.
And in a design iteration you've got an opportunity to be proactive, make changes, change the course, you know, to ultimately get to the goal we're all trying to achieve. Like, what are you trying to achieve here? but also from the business case, what is it going to cost to do that? How much money and time? But the projection also is, if you choose not to do it, here’s what you're not enabling. That's the side that I think sometimes gets under discussed.
That you may have actually eliminated a group of people or the ability to do this without months of training. You know, there are other factors that could be documented that say, you can choose this solution, but again, here are the consequences of that. So you just have to be mindful that later there's going to be a different cost. Which the cost may include eliminating certain people who may not be able to engage because of it. So it's not trivial, and it is a worthwhile investment.
But yeah, it's probably struggled on the business case side. I mean and not just human factors alone in the whole world of, you know, occupational health, like the concept of engineering things out. People want to kick that can down the road, potentially. They're like, we don't have time to fix that now. I'm like, well, okay, let's write that down. So [Laughter] We're going to end up revisiting this.
And it would be good because as, as part of a pool of data, not just a case study, this is a very, repetitively experienced issue. Right? Redesign. Have to ask, you know, just, you know, just being experienced, especially, just across industries and having that same conversation. You know, whenever you do encounter those situations because this is a part of Sophic’s model as well, as far as ensuring that we're integrating human factors, not only in decision making at the lower level.
So the engineering, the design levels, but also programmatic decision making process, do you find that it's it is worthwhile to kind of way to take a step back, take note of, that any pushback you're receiving, you know, whenever we are providing any input or feedback or do you find that it's more important, especially for you as a human factors professional to kind of push for, okay, we need to consider this now, or does it just depend on the situation?
Yeah, I, that is kind of the art of working with people and the art of communication and knowing, like reading the room.
A lot of times it's like, there's all kinds of elements of the like the interpersonal skills at play here, which sometimes in the working meeting, it may indeed be the very appropriate place to drive the conversation to say, you know, let's seriously discuss redesigning this, even though I understand you're always just, you know, under duress for time and money and things of that nature because you got to do the thought exercise if we don't do it and then have a rough approximation of
what do you think it'll cost later if we choose not to do this now? In other cases the room, the environment you're working in, the group you're working with is not secure enough in their own capabilities to really deal with- I was just about to say. like conflict. Sometimes it helps to come in and fill the gap.
Yeah. So I think that that is when again, reading the room, you say maybe this is something I have to take offline with a person or two where it doesn't look like you're challenging them, you know, and their intelligence or their skill in whatever they do, or their authority. You're not trying to just be difficult for the sake of being difficult. Right? You already have, you know, and it is cautioned because some folks and it's not just where you are in your career.
I've seen a couple different reasons for doing it, but they just have to say stuff like, like first of all, like first take a step back and what am I, if I'm going to say this, is it of value? Like is it really contributing to the conversation and also our jobs, and I think that's where it also takes some guts because you're going to put something on the table that looks like a challenge or obstacle that folks could recoil from.
Because you're like, well now I know, I might get treated like the bad guy. The lone- That's a real feeling. The lone wolf out there. And you’ve got to have the guts to put it on the table. But it's wrong not to have it on the table. So I think it is the art of it. Like it may not be at any one time the place to do it, but that's where you're like cataloging it.
And then you take it offline where you think the person would be more receptive to the conversation, then it can go back into the bigger group. So I worked it a couple of different ways because you are dealing with a lot of type A, very driven people.
They're all there to make the thing go. And, not always in the heat of the moment are they going to appreciate that you're actually assisting them with that, but when you're adding more work, or at least the perception of it, but for the greater good like otherwise you're going to end up redoing this later where the cost will be much higher. Right? The cost could be, you know, just never even touch a monetary, which is like awesome.
Like, I mean, we don't always try to exaggerate out that far, you know, for just for argument's sake. But there are times you can play a scenario out pretty quickly, especially when you're dealing with spaceflight, in the vacuum of space, like those things get serious quickly. We don't have a good backup. but I think, yeah, that is where, in this field that you really got to be, have the guts to put your opinion out there.
But the self-awareness to say one - are these words, in my opinion, that's backed up by this point of data valuable to do? And I can help guide you toward a solution, not just like, drop the conflict on the table and be like, good luck with it. I ask that because- No, sometimes that's what it takes though. You got to like, here's what we're running into and I think at least I don't know in your experience but in my experience, it's that continued not necessarily bringing conflict,
but framing almost, it's not piecemealing? Breadcrumbing? Whatever word you want to use there, of like we're going to get there, we're going to get there, we're going to get there. Here's how I can help. We're going to get there. It's one of those, like you said, interpersonal skills, but also kind of helping people understand how you can help. I think that's been the biggest, not hurdle, challenge, but kind of the, a bigger piece of it, at least.
Again, I don't know if you've experienced it, but what I've been doing these last couple months and then I became, suddenly became important. But it was one of those experiences where it's like, you got to get everybody on board. Actually, to your point, like you already said, present the situation and just you got to be real about it sometimes. But that again, that's probably just my personality talking.
No, no, no, it's something I mean, I've experienced it with many teams, you know, especially for human factors specifically, it can be implemented in the human factors methodology. Right? You can implement it in many different ways.
But even a human factors professionals, the field itself is very broad and something I'm learning, or I have learned over the last few years is that, you know, when I'm approaching a team, they're seeing how they're going to integrate me into a team in a very specific way. And me, personally, I go in thinking this is the methodology that's going to best fit what you're doing at this moment in time.
Often, you know, as our goal is to make sure any hardware, product is going to be efficient and safe for human use. Right? So I go in thinking, okay, identify risks. How can we best do that? What is going to be our analyses and our approach to analyses? Right? How are we going to mitigate human errors? Things like that. So for me coming in, that's the first thing I'm thinking about is, identify the risks.
But then whenever I present those potential risks and say, hey, this is something we should think about, of course you get the pushback. And I think in past my troub- my issue has always been, alright. Let's pause. Back up. Usually it's no, these are the risks. These are based on the initial assessments. These are just what we've identified so far. But you know, it's going to be dependant on where you are in your design process.
And from that perspective, I often find myself thinking I have to influence that decision right then and there. When in reality, to your point Jenn, you know, you really, bringing it to the table is one thing, but then making sure that it is valuable and it's, it is a real problem. You know, you're addressing a true problem that you have identified or a potential issue that you've identified. I think that's always been difficult for me in the early years.
That was something I had to work through mentally and just, okay, how do I approach this? Do I say something now? Maybe not. Sure, and I think there's different experiences based on whether you're well integrated into a team. And it is being kind of, you know, facilitative like a team activity, versus coming in like an outside auditor, and different, you know, mid-level leadership will treat groups differently.
I mean, it's just based on their experience or their preconceived notions of it so that's why you got to really read the room in terms of how can I be effective here? The other part of like, you know, where is that space where you can kind of think out loud? You know, because again, if you're, you're in the team and a lot of stuff is happening, you're part of the design and iteration, real time. You haven't like, you know, just like they are working.
You're also working through like this could really be a risk. You know and to put it, you know in the team conversation, get it on the table. But then as your thoughts mature and you go do your evaluation techniques, get data, look at, you know, prior art, as they say, like, what's a good analogy to this? Or you know, what's going on in the different subsystems.
So you understand as well, and you know, having some ground rules around, you know, even when we talk about the job, like, what do we expect the people to do? And how broad of a range of, like, diverse sets of people from a capabilities, cognitive, physical are we talking about? Going back to my earlier point about commercial space, the idea is just to keep on opening up those, that aperture. Right? And that makes design challenging.
So you lean on industry to, who deal with this all the time, you know, like automotive, you know, the size, shape and cognitive function and, situational awareness of people getting in a car and driving is, it's extreme variability. It also seems like you run into, like, really new natural con- not new, unique natural consequences of the combination of all of that. For sure.
I mean, there's always like, wow, like this is why looking at historical data is important, but it's not 100% predictive of the future, right? We continue to be surprised and befuddled by things. Not, like it’s again, like, I don't know it I don't know. Like that is a combination of things. You're playing between biology and physics and engineering like wow, a lot of things can happen.
But, you know, the important part is to continue to be in a learning mode, accept that you have to talk about uncertainty to be realistic, which again, when you're coming to the table, that's authentic. Right? You come in and when you talk about risk, it's not a single number. Right? And it has a lot of dependencies. So again you come to the table. I was more successful when I would come to the table with a risk. Or it starts out as an issue.
Like it is something you want to talk about before you can even transform it into like a formal and articulate it as risk. But then you're coming with solutions. And one of the solutions is “accept”. What I think we've learned a lot from and I put a priority on and that comes, you know, part of the integrity that that we have as a company is the transparency of that conversation. You can choose to accept it.
But you have to document it and has to be at some level, you know, moved up the chain so they understood what risks were accepted as the design process occurred and how much, you know, horizontally has happened with your peer systems so that they knew what the decisions were because everybody's got a series of choices. So that goes back to you know, the hierarchical need for systems engineering and integration.
You know, get SE&I together because now we all have to come to the table, let's talk about where we had latitude to choose why we chose what we did? What risk posture did we end up in? And then how did, when you have to interact with these other subsystems, which includes the human. What were their choices? And you know what, where did they land in their risk posture? And how well did those puzzle pieces work together? Where do things do things have to be reworked and reprioritized?
And then up a level is people, you know, people in positions of authority who can reallocate resources, such as money and time and priorities to help manage that, that challenge. So human factors at least is, at least, it is putting quantifiable, objective information on the table. You know, we layer in, we embed applied health and performance in, we really prefer like the overarching term being Human-Centered Design. The government industry world is going to be human system integration.
And so human factors as you said, is methodologies, it’s a toolset to come in and be objective and quantifiable. So applied health and performance also uses tools to be on the human side of what they bring to the table also has tools to be objective and quantifiable. So we don't have to talk about what we think or what we feel. We can talk about what we measured and we may have to go outside of course, our natural experience base or what we can measure in any one test
because it's just not large enough. Right? So we use, you know, access to databases that, you know, again we talk about applicable but give us something but there's some uncertainty. Why someone wants to pay for new data to be generated. Which is where you get into these business case conversations.
But I think it creates a paradigm where very legitimately you come to the table with value added, and a path forward of solution sets or at least the transparency of documenting what you choose, chose to acce- why you chose where you are and what you chose to accept. And you still have corporate memory of, what are my other choices if I have to go and manage conflict with another system? Or integration with another system?
So I think it's brought a lot, clearly a lot to the table to result in better design and opportunities to even iterate later. Given you may have had to accept something because of whatever was your goalpost of the day, whether it be a design review or a deliverable, have, you know, a functional unit to work. You know? You had a constraint, time, money. This technically was the best we could achieve to the goals of whatever it was you had determined by the kind of contractual relationship.
But if you get another shot at it, if there's a round two, if there's a version two and three and four and five, you have a place to learn from and a place, again, I talk a lot about design reference missions and concept of operations being so important contextually to understand why you're doing what you're doing. How close can you get to the goalpost? And if given different resources, can you get there?
and again, having anything that amounts to quantifiable and objective data is way more helpful than equals. And it's never to disrespect someone's experience base. There's a lot of that, especially in our industry where, you know, it's not, it's not like big data, it's deep data. Right? Because it's in a small field. So experience based is amazing, but it's not evidence based.
I don't think people realize how also big and deep, you know, human factors really is because, again, these last few months have been eye opening for me and relating my experience and my academic training. Right? You know, sitting at tables talking about optics and lasers and color filters and you’re like, you don’t think about that really being human but you’re like, no, no, no, it's very human. Or you're sitting there- You can talk about rods and cones.
Rods and cones in the eye, or you're talking thermodynamics, but we're not doing the calculus. You're just like, I care about heat and energy and how that's going to screw up my performance. Like, we're, we have the ability to at least, you know, I know our company does. We have the ability to go that deep and at that depth and go just far beyond, you know, if we want to go that route. But it's so- To infinity? To infinity and beyond.
I know there's an Interstellar reference coming out of my brain somewhere but I don't, I don't actually like I didn't understand coming in how deep human factors could get. And then I started doing it. This, so it is deep data and it is very, very quantitative. You can touch it. It's tangible. I just, you know, I think I've understood or experience people don't other people don't actually understand that.
And it really does translate into real world consequences or real world design updates or changes they’re just, so the iterations going back to kind of your concept are just so fast and so close together. No one actually ever really notices. Yeah and that's I guess it makes me think of, not to switch gears too much, but you know, in gaming, that's one space where you do get to see those variations, right? Once they're brought to market. Yes. And I think in terms, going back to acceptance.
Right? So for accepting risks, I think of the Wii, Nintendo Wii, going back to the controller, right? That, the first iteration of that controller without the grips and just- The wrist strap? Yeah having just the wrist strap and no one actually using it and seeing the videos of people playing tennis and then throwing it or hitting themselves in the face. And I think to myself, now, you know, being in industry, that was just a risk that was accepted at that point.
And then, after they released the initial console with the controllers, then they released the grips, the handgrips and then the industry, they also included the instructions for the wrist strap before you, once you turn on the console, attach the strap, put on the grips if you need them, you know, things like that. And I mean, I can go down the list of, you know, different consoles. So going back to the Atari, when it comes to decision making, that decision making process is very simple.
You have a joystick, and then they had buttons. That was it. There was just one joystick and then the separate buttons later down the line. And it was very simple to kind of move up and down. If I remember there was one game I played when I was a child. Atari at that point was pretty outdated. But, there was a, I think there was the only football game that they released on Atari. but I remember just trying to figure out as a child how to play this game, but it became very simple.
It would almost, just because I had to use two fingers on the joystick. And that was it. It was very easy. But looking today, you know, the designs have progressed so much. But other consoles have figured out you just need the D-pad and joystick and the buttons right here.
You know, I really don't have to think too much about the process, but then I go back to the Wii and the Switch you know, and thinking about all of that, you know, as it applies to gaming, you know, I think that's one example that we could use to say, you know what? We can see the real impact on data of process and design.
But I want to ask you guys, have you, do you have any other examples in different industries where, you know, you can clearly see the impact of not only human factors, but just integrating the methodologies from both human factors as well as, health and human performance as well. You know? If I may, tag on to your controller example, I have small hands. I'm a small person. So when Sony released their PS3, they released that really clunky, bulky controller.
Now queue me, am I allowed to call out specific video games? Okay, cue me trying to play Dishonored, where you have to use both thumbs and all of your fingers, and I'm, I was just sitting there like, my hands are entirely too small for this controller, right? Like I can't actually actuate anything to input a command. So, you know, mental demand is going up here and I'm getting frustrated and I put the game down. PS4 comes out. Controller is a little bit better. Right?
I go back to play Dishonored and I'm like okay, the feel, the design, little bit better. Sad it took them X amount of years to get here. But we're here, and I can get through the game. Queue the PS5 coming out and boy, how did they get that controller right? I can hold it. It fits in my tiny girl hands. It fits in larger hands. The joysticks are appropriately spaced. The buttons are appropriately spaced, hitting any of the triggers. It's a dual, not DualSense, what's the new one?
DualShock? Not DualShock. DualShock is PS2. That was the early version. But there is resistance now and it's it really interactive and it’s haptic feedback in the triggers. And it's a interactive experience. And yeah, now the controller really does scream at you but These are interesting examples because they actually, you know, we're heavily, pressured by users. Right? And so I don't know enough, you know, inside baseball with them.
And I definitely left probably a bit. I left, video games behind probably at Atari and by the time you got to those controllers that were just buttons and little joysticks, thumb joysticks like, I have no clue what any button does. I pursued other things. But I watch people do it. I'm into all that. But it has been interesting. I think that was, well, obviously as a company, they probably brought in human factors people to help. They had to. Well to meet the market needs.
It was, because they went to market with it that way. And I guess the question that we would pursue would be like with the updates that are great for your hand, which may be a 5 percentile female, where I talked about anthro measurements, what happened to the 95% male? Like their hands totally swamped the thing.
But can they have the big bulky one that you didn't fit like you know, is there interoperability so that something that is better for someone who's above the 50th percentile versus below the 50th percentile, it's just you need to be able to use either controller because the basic operations are the same. It's I don't know how the controllers, you know, communicate with the game overall it may be very limited, that’s a software problem. But these are the issues. Like again, we deal with that.
If you're trying to design something. That's why like in a car, how much play there is in all the facets of the seat, you know, and the steering wheel, like, I mean, I like my seat up a little higher than my spouse who sometimes drives my car and complains about it and I'm like, well, that's why you drive your own car where it has, you know, like multiple options when you get it. Like if he just used his key fob he’d be fine, right.
But so but going back to these interesting things, which are generational to some extent, like, again, we can talk about what people were trained to buy and are trainable, but joysticks that had a lot of movement in them like the original Atari joysticks, like when you wanted up, like it moved a lot. There was a lot of play. Now this actually went into the world of high performance, like aviation. Right. And how you operate these planes, which really means your operating a computer.
And you are trying to give direction. Right. And the original, stick was just like that there was a lot of climbing, right. So like you slammed it forward. You slammed it back. Left and right and so you had a lot of haptic feedback with respect to what direction and kind of like now versus gentle roll or like, we gotta go left now and it's going to be a dramatic.
So that for a long time, was pilots would experience it if they were playing games and they were experiencing it in the cockpit, their experience in the simulators. And then of course you go to a new generation aircraft which been formulating for some period of time. And they are pursuing new and different capabilities. And I remember at one point reading there was an abrupt change in that stick. And that stick lost all motion and it was just pressure sensitive.
So the stick didn't move, but it was responsive to how much force you're putting on and the direction of the force. The problem was the human was not getting the haptic feedback to say the stick recognized it until the well, the plane moved and it’s going to move very quickly. But it was a big transition for those pilots who spent 20 years flying a plane that way. And I'm sure it was a big adjustment for the prior pilots who were going from a very different actuator to the joystick model.
Now, the joystick model went from having a lot of dramatic haptic feedback to very little, you know. So then they had to go from software perspective, actually recreate haptic feedback. So that the person giving the command via pressure got the sense like oh, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. I hear it often. Like up, back, left, right. We were all being, it had a responsive nature to it.
And they realized like, oh we can't just this is where you have to bridge sometimes when you're talking about a new capability, that step function change from one capability to the next is ignoring the fact that the human, we have trained ourselves a certain way based on an experience base in this age it’s very technologically based and we can get to the other place. But there's a transition. And I will say that in the world of like industry, those costs have to be assessed.
Retraining people and changing the logistics and supply chain are actually a function of part of the business case. Whether to make a change or not. And people will not change because they're like, is this worth it overall for us to move to this, say it’s a process improvement.
But what percent improvement does this have to be to warrant all of the infrastructure changes that have to get us there, which include like cognitive retraining, didactic retraining, you know, like and then the people who work on whatever object it is, you know, the mechanics. But it's almost like controller design, you know, controllers and all. I'm not going to come full circle because it's still evolving.
But we now have gaming controllers where you have, you're training people on gaming controllers for things like drones. And sub-sea operations, ROVs, things like that. So I guess now we're drawing off of the current generation, a combined set of generations user experience to actually, I don't know if it actually simplifies the process or the task. But that's the question that should be tested.
So not being directly involved like in that work per se, but how much was the you know, we talked about cognitive load. So it's always physical and cognitive EOC’s testing the, talked about load meaning how much work is being done. But then when does fatigue happen and how does fatigue manifest.
And those are things like getting better and smarter at tools that help us again measure them objectively cause often fatigue, you know, is rated on a scale like, you know, even levels of effort are rated numerically and so you transform something qualitative into quantitative, which, which is fine. I mean, that's that isn't a necessary thing. But we're also seeking biomarkers and other things that are more indicative and agnostic with respect to your opinion.
You know, given in your self-assessment and say, like, I know you said you were fine and it wasn't terrible, but your eyes could not track. Like your brain is fatiguing out and trying to get to the part of how sensitive and specific are some of these biomarkers. And I mean a very broad, a very broad characteristic of biomarkers, meaning like something like eye tracking is a biomarker, I'm not just saying blood and urine sample, you know, biological measures but those are very interesting.
And it I think in our world, like professionally for people, they should be integrated into these systems. Not thought of as something that has to be done in addition because they're part of the work. So it's like as you're sitting staring at a computer screen, you computer has a camera, and I know you get probably a whole other podcast on, you know, privacy. [Untranscribable due to laughter.] There’s benefits to be had there but there's risks.
but the idea that that camera could be doing an eye tracking assessment while you're reading and the concept would be a software algorithm in the background. Understand your baseline and, you know, you have to have some interaction with it, like, I feel great today.
I had six or more hours of sleep and I, you know, I'm raring to go I had four cups of coffee and then, you know, and you go at it and whatever your interaction is, that is the concept of your job or your task and you know what success is. You know, you go through your reading your papers, you're doing your editing, you’re you know building your report. And like, life is good. And then it's like four hours later you've been at it and suddenly, like, your eye tracking is drifting.
Your reaction times are slower, your keystrokes are sloppy, you're making more mistakes, and it's like you really need a break. You know, like the the concept of helping people be better by using these tools that are accessing them and are sensitive and specific to certain outcomes, meaning like, you may not be willing to admit you’re fatigued, but you're showing all the signs and symptoms of fatigue.
The best thing you could do for yourself is go step away from this interface so you know save it up. Lockdown. Go take a walk. Go have your lunch. Then come back. But you need to walk away from it. Because we have particularly in, high risk occupations, you have a lot of go fever. And again from a human factors sense when we talk about assessing risk and the idea of fatigue, it becomes very, amorphous discussion. You're like, no, I'll just suck it up and get it done.
It was like, well, I understand that. But that may not be the safe and right choice. You know, we all struggle with that. Like, you know, I can drive another ten minutes. I can, you know, and go at this paper another hour and you're like, well, now I spent an hour staring at it, wasn't able to complete a sentence. Was that a good use of my time?
So in the end there's lots of ways to apply these tools that I think could be used to help the individual as well as the goals of whoever while you're there, whether it be for pleasure or for work, or for medical care. I mean, this goes for surgeons, too. And I didn't talk about some of the robotic surgery where, similar to all this gaming. You know, someone’s performing, and now it's, remote medicine, robotic surgery happening. Which is absolutely amazing.
But you really want objective assurance that the person operating these devices, the robotic arm on any spaceflight vehicle that that they are in the condition, the right space to go do this. And if they're not, the technology can help detect it and give them some feedback. And it's not saying you're disqualified. What it's saying is you'd be better at this if you did it 20 minutes from now, if you went and did what you could do to like, rest and recover.
I think we just we push beyond our limits, thinking that that is the better of the choices. And with some of these capabilities, we could get that help. We need to say like, here's another choice for you and still preserve your outcome and actually probably make that outcome more likely, more safe and more effective. But a little it’s you have to consider like being willing and open to coaching. Yeah, that’s very true.
But I think we're in a place now where technology might be trying to integrate that. At least, I know my car does it right. It'll show me a little coffee cup you’re this focused. Maybe you should take a break. When you're drifting? When you're drifting. Things like that. And I think the automotive industry has been on top of some of that. You know, it also clearly signals when people are more significantly impaired. And again it's non-judgmental.
It doesn't know if it's alcohol, drugs or sleeplessness, but all it knows is that you're not staying in your lane. It's taking snapshots. I think as a whole industry is probably trying to move to that more active sensing and tracking. But, you know, we're just not there yet. Yeah. So we've had a pretty wide ranging conversation. We have. And I think it’s been good. Same, same, and I think we kind of typically I go into the, the phase of the conversation where we discuss, we wrap up everything.
But I feel like we've summarized everything throughout the conversation with regards to how human factors truly does impact decision making at every level, with, with regards to designs across industries. So thank you both for joining us today. And thank you to our listeners and viewers for joining us today. Once again, this has been an episode of The Human Odyssey Podcast. Please find us on all social media platforms including, Spotify, Apple and anywhere else, Facebook, Instagram.
Where else- [Offscreen whisper] YouTube, YouTube YouTube as well, and- Getting help from the gallery. Thank you. Thank you to our viewers. No, but please feel free to, as you're watching this video. Please don't forget to like and subscribe as well as, comment if you're finding us on Instagram or Facebook and thank you again. Hope see you next time. [Laughter] The Human Odyssey is presented by Sophic Synergistics, the experts in Human-Centered Design. Find out more at SophicSynergistics.com.
Get smart, get Sophic smart.