Portfolio
I am a PhD candidate in Human Factors and Applied Cognitive Psychology, also known as Engineering Psychology. For more information about what that means, check out this article from the American Psychological Association. Some of my research and design work is not yet public, but here are examples of my work taken from side projects I completed during my doctoral training. If you’d like to see a more formal snapshot of my experience, please see my CV. Otherwise, read on! Portfolio Contents
- Curriculum Vitae
- Boeing’s Flight Deck of the Future R&D prototype
- Redesigning the iDrive
- The Adaptive Digital Dashboard
Evaluating Boeing’s Flight Deck of the Future (2004-Present)
Most people don’t know that modern airliners run on autopilot almost all the time. In fact, newer planes are technically capable of completing an entire flight with almost no input from humans. Sadly, the interfaces that control these incredibly complicated automated flight computers date back to the 1970’s, and many important human factors studies have uncovered serious usability problems (ie, Sarter & Woods, 1995; Sherry et al, 2002). In fact, some of these problems were so serious that Airbus had to release emergency fixes to their aircraft after hundreds of people died in a string of notorious interface-related crashes. My advisor and I, at George Mason University, teamed up with an R&D group at Boeing Commercial Airplanes to help them evaluate new prototype flight deck interfaces designed to fix these kinds of problems. In one study of the new interfaces, we found statistically significant performance improvements of up to 100% for certain tasks.
Current Generation Panel
Boeing’s Flight Deck of the Future (from Prada, et al, 2006)
From a safety perspective, this work is very rewarding. From a technical perspective, it embodies some of the most serious challenges facing Human Computer Interaction. How do we compare drastically different systems? How do we define tasks without confounding them with the requirements of the tools? And how can we predict performance without going through expensive user testing every single time a design question comes up? Finding answers for these problems has resulted in a surprisingly interesting research program for me. Applied psychologists have been studying human system interaction problems in aircraft for nearly a hundred years. I was fortunate enough to be among those who were able to work directly on the solutions. As the project has gained recognition, we’ve started collaborating with some other groups, including teams at NASA, the University of Colorado, and Carnegie Mellon. Eventually, Boeing hired me as a contractor to support the Flight Deck team while I finished my dissertation. If you’d like to read technical reports describing this work, check out my curriculum vitae.
Driving Design: Redesigning the iDrive (2005)
This was a project I completed with Carl Smith, Mohammad Rahman, and Nicholas Prada, to redesign BMW’s first automotive computer interface, the iDrive. (This was an academic project, unaffiliated with BMW.) The iDrive was a single control knob tied to a small monitor on the car’s dashboard. This knob was intended to control more than a hundred different functions. Unfortunately, iDrive’s menus were confusing, inconsistent, incoherent, and wound up getting the company very negative publicity. Our team estimated millions of dollars in losses tied to poor sales of iDrive-equipped cars. In this project, we wanted to show how BMW might have avoided these problems if they had used simple task analysis design techniques… without even changing their clever, but not very suitable, hardware controls.
Click the image above to see the final article, which was published in the September, 2005 issue of User Experience magazine. It includes a short description of our design approach, screenshots, and even a critique of our work by several automotive experts.
The Adaptive Digital Dashboard (2006) 
A year after iDrive, Carl Smith, Mohammad Rahman and I reunited for another automotive project. This one was a contest entry in the 2006 International Award in Design, Engineering and Innovation in the field of Automotive Human Factors, sponsored by some prety big names, including the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (icsid) and the Italdesign-Giugiaro group, who are famous for their work on concept cars. Despite a small culture clash that occured when we psychologists took on the industrial design community, we managed to bring the EU$2500 Ex Aequo award all the way from Italy to George Mason University. The purpose of our project was to create a comprehensive human centered design approach, from requirements to validation. We conducted field work at car shows, interviewed different types of drivers, and evaluated market conditions. Then we tested the approach by designing a fully digital, touch senstitive dashboard for weekend racers, which was made into 3D mock-ups by a graphics studio at GMU. The design used psychologically-based rules for displaying information relevant to street driving (top), diagnostics (middle), and a special mode for maximizing performance on the racetrack (bottom). I’m not going to explain the design in detail here. (Our tech report ran more than 100 pages.) We have some articles in preparation that discuss the design and approach in a more accesible manner
Until then, here’s a flash animation of driving and racing mode that shows some of the features of the dashboard. (coming soon.)