Beth Loring

• MS Engineering Design
• Founder & Principal at Loring Human Factors, LLC

Over the course of two years, the author and colleagues conducted user experience (UX) research as part of two clinical trials. This paper describes the research methodology, the challenges encountered, the rewards, and the lessons learned from the experience. The subject of the clinical trials was a novel treatment for a degenerative disease that...

Historically it has not been terribly difficult for researchers to gain access to healthcare facilities to conduct user research such as contextual inquiry and workflow analysis. Today, some practitioners are finding it nearly impossible to get into facilities. One reason is that hospitals are getting progressively more risk-averse regarding patien...

The development of health information technologies should be informed by iterative experiments in which qualitative and quantitative methodologies provide a deeper understanding of the abilities, needs, and goals of the target audience for a personal health application. Our objective was to create an interface for parents of children with attention...

FEATURE AT A GLANCE: This case study describes the user-centered redesign of a laparoscopic instrument handle for Cardinal Health. A multidisciplinary team designed a new handle that addressed multiple ergonomic shortcomings and enabled surgeons to perform procedures with greater comfort, safety, and efficiency. Improvements included a flexible gri...

This chapter focuses on the interaction with participants at three points of contact as follows: during recruiting, when they arrive, and during the pretest briefing. It discusses the critical time before the test starts, when one has the chance to make a great first impression, establish rapport with participants, and put them at ease. Steps of re...

This chapter provides some guidance to moderators who are just starting out. It discusses the attributes of a great moderator, types of testing, moderator (sometimes conflicting) roles, the basics of running a test, and finally some ways to get started quickly as a moderator. To be an effective moderator, one is required to have a firm understandin...

This chapter covers the issues that moderators spend most of their time dealing with during the 60 to 90 minutes when participants are working on tasks. It focuses on common situations that occur most of the time, not unusual events that rarely occur. This chapter contains a set of “good practice” guidelines for the everyday situations, such as how...

This chapter discusses the activities that happen after the test itself, such as maintaining roles, determining the order of activities, clarifying things that occurred during the test, administering ratings and questionnaires, asking open-ended questions, allowing others to interact with participants, providing incentives, and other final activiti...

This chapter presents the first five golden rules for interacting with test participants. The five rules in this study are the broadest in scope. They lay the foundation for effective moderating. These core rules are as follows: “decide how to interact based on the purpose of the test; respect the participants' rights; remember your responsibility...

This chapter briefly discusses five golden rules, as follows: “let the participants speak, remember that your intuition can hurt and help you, be unbiased, do not give away information inadvertently, and watch yourself to keep sharp.” The rules emphasize that it is important to let the participant speak, rather than dropping into a conversation. On...

This chapter gives an overview on interacting in a remote test session. Remote usability testing refers to testing sessions in which moderator and participant are not physically in the same place but are communicating via electronic technology. There are two common types of remote testing: synchronous and asynchronous. In synchronous remote testing...

This chapter explores a number of arrangements and discusses their advantages and disadvantages. The goal is to present the options fairly so one can make his or her own decision because it has been found that this issue can be very controversial, perhaps the most controversial issue in this chapter. This chapter covers a brief history of arrangeme...

The chapter provides seven videos, and also explains their purpose and provides some advice about how to view them. Six videos show test sessions in progress. They are not highlighted videos; rather, each one focuses on one 5- to 7-minute segment of a typical test session. Two videos focus on the pretest instructions, two focus on interacting while...

This chapter provides guidelines for interacting with a several populations, such as people with physical disabilities, the elderly, people with cognitive disabilities or low literacy skills, children and teens and people from cultures different from the moderator's. Usability professionals, have the responsibility to design and evaluate products f...

The chapter provides a brief introduction for both newcomers to usability testing and experienced practitioners who want to reflect on their own practices. Usability testing is now accepted as the evaluation method that influences product design the most. To a large extent, successful usability testing depends on the skills of the person moderating...

Many aspects of usability testing have been thoroughly studied and documented. This isn't true, however, of the details of interacting with the test participants who provide the critical usability data. This omission has meant that there have been no training materials and no principles from which new moderators can learn how to interact. Moderatin...

A “perfect storm” has formed in the intranet search space, where information is doubling yearly, no usable metadata exists, and search users' expectations continue to increase. New information repository types, collaboration methods, and security protocols complicate the design of a comprehensive solution. Over the past two years, the moderator and...

This case study describes our approach to enhancing the way family members may interact with each other - and their homes - in the near future. Samsung Electronics and American Institutes for Research worked together to show how the user-centered design of network technology in the home could best enhance a family's ability to com-municate, play, a...

The goal of this study was to assess the usability of portable electronic emergency medical equipment. The study consisted of field interviews conducted with emergency medical workers, including emergency medical technicians (EMTs), paramedics, and firefighters. We sampled a varied population, including workers from urban and suburban areas as well...

You are half way through a usability test session, and the participant's cell phone rings. She answers it and says it is her child calling and she has to leave immediately, but she will be back in 45 minutes to finish the test. What should you do? In the course of running hundreds of product evaluations, we have encountered some awkward and unusual...

Human factors practitioners are often asked to conduct usability research in multiple cities to obtain a larger, geographically dispersed sample. Instead of selecting cities first and participants second (as is often done in market research), we suggest an approach whereby usability professionals can select cities based on the type of research and...

The purpose of this study was to add to the knowledge of older consumers and their use of electronic products. The work involved redesigning a microwave oven by employing a touch screen interface. This provided a simpler panel with limited choices, step-by-step prompts and larger controls and displays. The design was tested for usability with 8 peo...

Computer-based products require designers to make trade-offs between the product's initial and long term ease of use. The trade-off decisions are particularly important in the design of a computer-based automobile navigation system (ANS). An ANS designed for the mass market must serve the needs of both first time users, such as rental car drivers,...

The prospect of using a touch screen to interact with navigation displays led us to develop and evaluate three reduced-size, touch screen keyboards. One keyboard had a standard QWERTY layout; another had a modified QWERTY layout with keys aligned in a matrix; the third had a matrix of keys arranged in alphabetical order. Twenty adults varying in ag...

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) can be contracted by persons who are transfused with blood that contains by HIV the AIDS virus. As a result, in addition to testing all blood for the AIDS virus, blood collection organizations have sought ways to prevent individuals from giving blood if they (1) know that they carry the virus or (2) are at...

American Institutes for Research (AIR) assisted the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to identify the human factors issues that should be addressed in a forthcoming voluntary safety standard for step stools. According to CPSC data, older people, children, and women of all ages are over-represented in step stool accidents. We studied the acc...

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission sponsored us to perform a human factors evaluation of existing swimming pool warning signs. Our study covered warnings which convey the messages “NO DIVING” and “WATCH CHILDREN”. These warnings are particularly intended to reduce the incidence of diving accidents involving teenage boys and drowning accide...

This paper discusses issues related to conducting user research -- such as interviews, usability tests and focus groups -- in languages other than the usability practitioner's native language. It addresses topics relating to the planning, execution and reporting of such research. This paper also presents an overview of cultural considerations, and...