Population Analysis: Communicating in Context

Providing accommodation to a widely varying user population presents a challenge to engineers and designers. It is often even difficult to quantify who is accommodated and who is not accommodated by designs, especially for equipment with multiple critical anthropometric dimensions. An approach to communicating levels of accommodation referred to as population analysis applies existing human factors techniques in novel ways. This paper discusses the definition of population analysis as well as major applications and case studies. The major applications of population analysis consist of providing accommodation information for multivariate problems and enhancing the value of feedback from human-in-the-loop testing. The results of these analyses range from the provision of specific accommodation percentages of the user population to recommendations of design specifications based on quantitative data. Such feedback is invaluable to designers and results in the design of products that accommodate the intended user population.