BlackHägen Design conducts user research using passive and interactive discovery methods to elicit user aspirations, identify latent needs and unmet efficiencies, and characterize usage scenarios. Whenever possible, we immerse our team of analytical researchers and designers in the usage environment of a product or system, known as contextual inquiry. By passively observing users in context, we record workflow metrics, characterize the relationships of associated devices and actors within a system, and finish by interviewing users with advanced participatory research tools.
The powerful insights discovered with these qualitative research techniques are then translated into robust requirements and actionable design initiatives that create a foundation for innovation. This empirical methodology is considered one of the foundational building blocks of a good usability engineering process, establishing testable usability inputs for downstream formative studies culminating in an FDA-required human factors engineering report.
BH’s comprehensive HFE toolbox enables project teams to apply appropriate levels of usability oversight throughout the design and development process to ensure user needs and use-safety measures are integrated into end-product design. By integrating an iterative, cost-effective strategy from the earliest phases of design, culminating with a rigorous summative validation, we provide a quality-complaint process that demonstrates use-related safety and yields a superior commercial design.
BH’s design engineering team work closely with human factors and user-experience members to fully understand the product vision as interpreted through powerful user-studies, respecting evolving innovation and product differentiation strategies. The combined team balance all desired project goals to determine the best system solutions that will ultimately drive the success of the product in its defined market.
Superior user-experience relies on the successful integration of industrial and UI design, whereby all aspects of the user interface are thoughtfully and elegantly executed, resulting in efficient and accurate device operation. BH’s UI designers work closely with their ID and systems/software teams to embrace advanced technologies and control features that are logical, attractive, reliable, and highly efficient.
The industrial design process considers and integrates system-level architecture into a variety of mechanical concepts to explore the best-balanced solution that addresses user-needs, while optimizing the workflow experience through intuitive functionality, passionate aesthetics, and pragmatic efficiency. At BH, our designers are experienced in defining the best approach to mechanical layout, materials, finish, and methods of assembly that ensure ease of use, service, manufacture, and sustainability at the lowest unit cost.
