When you distribute globally it is embarrassing to find that some group or another, with wider-set eyes or smaller hands, finds your product difficult to use. “We want to make sure that we have a diverse population we can draw on when we develop our products,” said Adams. All of them come into play when creating and testing a new piece of hardware. This menagerie of parts represents not just a continuum of sizes but a variety of backgrounds and ages. And next door to those is a variety of noses, eyes and temples, each representing a different facial structure or interpupillary distance. Next door is a collection of ears, not only rendered in extreme detail but with different materials simulating a variety of rigidities. These are all cast from real people, ranging from the small thumb of a child to a monster that, should it have started a war with mine, I would surrender unconditionally. Various models of body parts have been set out on work surfaces, I suspect for my benefit.Īmong them are that set of thumbs, in little cases looking like oversized lipsticks, each with a disturbing surprise inside. The lab is a space perhaps comparable to a medium-sized restaurant, with enough room for a dozen or so people to work in the various sub-spaces set aside for different highly specific measurements. (Perhaps you take this, as I did, as - in addition to a statement of purpose - a veiled reference to a certain other company whose keyboards have been in the news for other reasons.
We try to cover the physical, cognitive and emotional interactions with our products.” “Feats of engineering heroics are great,” said Adams, “but they have to meet a human need. The trend here, as elsewhere in the design process and labs, is that you can’t count out anything as a factor that increases or decreases comfort the little things really do make a difference, and sometimes the microscopic ones.
#MICROSOFT ERGONOMIC KEYBOARD MECHANICAL SKIN#
Here the company puts its hardware to the test by measuring how human beings use it, recording not just simple metrics like words per minute on a keyboard, but high-speed stereo footage that analyzes how the skin of the hand stretches when it reaches for a mouse button, down to a fraction of a millimeter. No, it isn’t a torture chamber - not for humans, anyway. Inside the Human Factors lab, human thumbs litter the table. Generally speaking, the work I got to see fell into three general spaces: the Human Factors Lab, focused on very exacting measurements of people themselves and how they interact with a piece of hardware the anechoic chamber, where the sound of devices is obsessively analyzed and adjusted and the Advanced Prototype Center, where devices and materials can go from idea to reality in minutes or hours. I was genuinely surprised and pleased to find people occupying niches so suited to their specialties and inclinations.
But the other folks in the labs were very obliging in answering questions and happy to talk about their work. Microsoft obviously isn’t the only company to have hardware labs and facilities like this, but they’ve been in the game for a long time and have an interesting and almost too detailed process they’ve decided to be open about.Īlthough I spoke with perhaps a dozen Microsoft Devices people during the tour (which was still rigidly structured), only two were permitted to be on record: Edie Adams, chief ergonomist, and Yi-Min Huang, principal design and experience lead. I really just think this stuff is really cool, and companies seldom expose their design processes in the open like this. They call this sort of thing “access journalism,” but the second part is kind of a stretch. Knowing how interesting I’d found the place before, I decided I wanted to take part and share it at the risk of seeming promotional. I’d actually been there before a few times, but it had always been off-record and rather sanitized. You don’t get something like this by aping the competition.įirst, a disclosure: I may as well say at the outset that this piece was done essentially at the invitation (but not direction) of Microsoft, which offered the opportunity to visit their hardware labs in Building 87 and meet the team.