Designing for people: integrating human factors into the product realization process

The contributions that human factors might make to the development of a realistic but hypothetical product, a multimedia collaborative workstation, are described. It is pointed out that the human factors specialist must be able to work with marketing, systems engineering, and development in order to balance usability requirements with market constraints, system requirements, and development costs. The result should be that the product is not only desirable, but is useful and usable. A hypothetical product is followed through the four stages of the product realization process to illustrate the roles human factors specialists can play at each stage