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• Exam 1 for ISYE/PSYCH 349 will be held in Spring 2025.

Basic Information

• The exam is on Wednesday 2/19 during class, from 2:30 PM to 3:45 PM.
• The format is 25 multiple-choice questions with each question worth 2 points, totaling 50 points.
• The exam is on Canvas and Honorlock will be used.
• Be sure to bring the computer that was used for the practice quiz.
• Topics to be covered include Intro to HFE, Design & Systems Thinking, Evaluation, Visual Perception, Auditory Perception, and Other Perception.

Honor Lock

• Honor lock features enabled include picture and room scan beforehand, screen recording, web traffic recording, browser guard, disabling copy/paste, and disabling printing/screenshot.
• The system will flag anything it finds 'suspicious'.
• There is chat support available if you have any problems, especially if completing the practice quiz.
• Paper copies will be available only for those who requested it ahead of time.
• Also backup quantities of roughly 10 paper copies will be available.

Practice Quiz for Honor Lock

• There is a practice quiz available on canvas.
• Class time will be available Monday 2/17 for students to take the practice quiz
• Take the practice quiz on the device that will be used for Exam 1 to ensure the Chrome add-in is installed.
• Honor lock is generally NOT compatible with iPads.

Notecards

• Students may bring one 3x5-inch or 4x6-inch notecard with notes on the front and back.
• The exam bank for Exam 1 has approximately 150 questions, from which 25 will be assigned.
• Each question is worth 2 points.

Question Focus

• Questions will not focus on memorizing definitions or diagrams.
• Equations will be provided.
• Focus is on understanding processes and systems and how to design considering users.
• Also focuses on how to analyze existing systems to find users' pain points.

How to Prepare

• Slides are a good place to start.
• The slides use sources from the book, and also contain examples.
• The slides provide a skeleton of the topics.
• They also will include questions and examples.
• As you look through the slides, be sure to answer the questions in you own words, and give examples.

Questions to Answer

• Intro to HFE may include slides such as: What is an example of a high-risk domain, a workplace, and a consumer product?, Then, can you explain why the examples you pick fit into those categories?, What do the length of the lines in these triangles mean?, Why is emphasis put on each of these areas for each type of domain?
• If you find yourself unable able to answer these types of questions, flag that slide

Reviewing

• Reference personal notes or go back to Canvas for any flagged areas.
• Each topic page references sections of the book.
• The book can be used to help fill in gaps
• There will be no practice exams, but some sample questions will be available at the end of the review.

Review Activity

• After reviewing content, visit the instructors office to discuss if you are still confused.
• There is also a 'review' activity that can potentially earn you some extra credit.
• You can earn credit by writing your own exam questions.

Review Structure

• There will be a gathering of big ideas from each topic to help refresh memory.
• Keep in mind that anything that has been covered is fair game for the exam.
• All relevant diagrams will be provided.
• I'm not expecting memorization of times scales or illumination for tables.
• Students should understand the relationships between items, such as understanding perception vs forming habits.
• Also consider what type of task requires more illumination.

Topic 1: Intro to HFE (The Human Element)

• The goals are to improve jobs and products to improve safety and efficiency, and focus on the human experience and health
• These goals are influenced by a variety of physiological, psychological, and social factors.
• Because of the volume of work in the human side of design, another key area within human factors is understanding bias in design and common design process shortcomings.
• Consider examples of human factors problems and solutions including ergonomics, accidents, healthcare, and social factors.

What is Human Factors?

• Human factors engineers aims to make technology work for people.
• Early developments focused on improving workplace productivity and efficiency.
• During World War II pilots died due to human error more often than combat.
• Later, the field expanded to consider the user experience in terms of satisfaction
• With the rise of in-home technology and the Internet, the field was forced to evolve even further.

Human Error

• Human error is a symptom of poor design.
• All systems include people and meeting their needs is the end goal of engineers and designers.
• Systems that don't work for people, don't work at all.
• Human factors helps us stop playing the blame game and identify unrecognized needs that aid in avoiding mishaps and improve user experiences.

Domains of Human Factors

• Human factors involves several branches.
• Individual branch includes engineering psychology.
• Physical branch includes ergonomics and biomechanics, biomedical engineering, anatomy & physiology, architecture, and industrial, civil & mechanical engineering .
• Organizational branch includes macro-ergonomics.
• Cognitive branch includes cognitive science & behavior, industrial & organizational psychology, and human-computer interactions and computer science.

System Design Processes

• Person-centered outcomes include organization, people technology & tools, environment and tasks. As these items interact with the environment, they produce outcomes.
• Goals of Human Factors in High-risk domains include safely, performance and satisfaction.
• Goals of Human Factors in the Workplace include safely, performance and satisfaction.
• Goals of Human Factors in consumer products include safely, performance and satisfaction.
• Human Factors Design Cycle & Design Thinking involves the steps of understanding, creating, then evaluating, and then looping back again to continue improving.

Design Approaches

• Person-Centered approach focuses on individuals.
• It blames human error including inattention, carelessness, or forgetfulness.
• Methods to combat include campaigns, rewriting procedures disciplinary measures, blaming, and shaming,
• The target of the Person-Centered approach is the individuals involved.
• Systems-Centered approach focuses on the conditions in which the problems occur.
• It builds defenses to avert opportunity for errors or mitigate their effects.
• Methods to combat include creating better systems.
• The target of Systems-Centered approach is the system (teams, tasks, workplaces, tools, and organization).

Redistribution of Error

• Autopilot systems are designed to remove the pilot from certain flight operations to help eliminate error.
• The idea is that the computer is better than the human at certain tasks including Navigation, Course tracking, and Holding altitude.
• If pilots do not fully understand the autopilot system, the errors are simply redistributed.

System Designs

• Vee Processes are often used in the design of high-risk systems such as aviation.
• Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle increases workplace efficiency and production quality.
• Scrum Process is used for consumer software products like smartphones and web applications.
• Human-Centered Design must balance speed and accuracy, with the overriding principle to center the design process around people.

Systems Thinking

• A holistic perspective is important to human-centered design
• Systems thinking can improve user experience and help us avoid unintended consequences
• We can simplify the human-centered design process into three major phases.

Prototyping

• The understanding stage focuses on the user, and determining their wants and needs
• The create stage focuses on the prototype and how can we make things?
• The evaluate stage focuses on usability, and seeing if it works.
• Usability tests should be conducted multiple times, expecting many iterations. This helps identifying useful functions and user interactions.

Task Analysis

• This stage requires collecting data in one of the following methods:
  • Direct Observation
  • Accident analysis - interviewing those involved
  • Time and Motion studies - improving manual labor
  • Contextual Inquiry - revealing user needs through careful observation
• The steps for Task Analysis include: Define - Collect - Interpret - Innovate
• When preforming the actions also remember to account for: Hierarchical relationships, information flow, interface content, sequence timing, efficient interactions and the context the interactions will take place in.
• Remember to mitigate data collecting methods' limits.

Types of Diagrams

• Task Hierarchy
• Activity Diagram
• Sequence Diagram

Types of Analysis

• Environmental Context

• Workload

• Safety and hazard

• Function allocation

• Usability Heuristics

  • includes 10 key components: system/system, real-world/freedom, standards/prevention, flexibility/design, recognition/documentation.

Testing

• Quality Function Deployment involves understanding that weighted ratings can reflect how well features serve each objectives.
• Cost-Benefit Analysis helps to justify work, it is effective in proving value.

Evaluation

• Evaluation identifies opportunities to improve so the design meets the user's needs. Can be Formative of Summative. Evaluation needs to Understand, Diagnose and Verify the product,
  • in doing so, can collect qualitative data, and use open ended survey
  • task analysis helps to collect quantitative methods
  • using cognitive walkthroughs and analyzing fields can all play a part in different data collections

Experimental Research Methods:

• Experiments should be carefully planned and executed:
  • Define the problem and hypothesis.
  • Specify the experiment.
  • Perform ethical analysis.
  • Conduct the study.
  • Analyze and conclude

Bias

• Can happen during planning/ data-analysis/ collection phases of research
  • major sources include: study design, selection, interviewer and citation basis.
• Experimental design can be:
  • Multiple Group: two-group design
  • Factorial: relies on single subject study
  • Between Subject: Independent variables
  • Dependent Variables: casual values
  • With-in Subject

Participants

• Participants should represent:
  • The population of the group
  • and contain a diverse range to avoid bias.

Concepts

• Confounding will occur when certain factors influencing the dependent and independent variables causes false associations. One way to fix this is randomization
• When analyzing data with statistics
  • Data Analysis requires a need to define the dependent variable based on treatment or condition, and determine whether treatments worked
    • this requires descriptive statistics, inferential and and avoiding jumping to conclusions.
• Conclusion can be drawn from the data but should be done with understanding and communication.
• Common errors in the process include: Type I and II errors

Stats

• Adjustments can be made in type 1 or 2, but focusing only on that leads to issues.
• Low participant numbers can affect usefulness of statistical analysis
• Statistical analysis isn't the same as practical significance

Usability

• In usability Testing there may come certain difficulties or things that can affect the test including
  • Learnability
  • Efficiency
  • Memorability
  • Errors
  • Satisfaction

Properties of studies

• Good studies are determined by it's validity.
  • Construct
  • Internal
  • External

Timescales

• Longer time scale factors include:
  • Expertise
  • Habits
  • Deliberating( on decisions)
  • Circadian ( sleep cycle)
  • Vigilance decrement
• Shorter time scale factors include :
  • Memory
  • Unbroken Attention
  • Physiological function
  • Reacting

Light

• Intensity should be controlled. Can be characterized by luminious intensity or lumious flux. Illuminance and brightness. These can affect both distance and clarity at various degrees based on what is being looked at.

Physical Quantities of Light

• Luminous flux

• Measured as 1 candela or 12.57 lumens (lm).

• Illuminance

• Measured as 1 foot candle (fc) (lm/ft²) or 10.76 lux (lm/m²).

• Luminance

• Measured as 1 foot lambert (fL).

• Reflectance

• Calculated with R = luminance/illuminance.

• The amount needed is dependent on the tasks preformed, more clarity needed, the higher the amount!

• Illuminance can be calculated with "F x N x UF x MF" / "A"

Eye Anatomy

• Key terms include:

  • Cornea, Pupil, Ciliary muscles, Retina, Rods, Cones, Fovea, Optic nerve

• Visual Angles are expressed using an arc-tan formula. The Formula and the height of the object.

• Rods can be easily oversaturated with color, unlike cones! Remember to balance levels!

• Light and dark adaption determine the speed we tell color from objects

Impairments and Issues

• These are some possible disabilities/impairments that can alter the perception of how people can percieve what they see, there can also be external factors too such as "glare".
• We can consider the use of systems too to see certain results
• Visual Search and Detection rely on 2 eye movements can either be search strat or serial (based on the user or situation).