With the help of some leading experts, Alun Lewis examines strategic issues facing designers and users in harnessing the flood of new technologies continually arriving

Technology’s a pretty amazing thing. With Moore’s Law having been ticking away in the background over the last few decades, we’ve seen the processing power of integrated circuits double roughly every two years. Broadly similar and complementary laws have emerged in other technology areas such as hard disk performance as well as LCDs and LED for cameras and displays.

Linking all these, communications technologies have also progressed in leaps and bounds, squeezing yet more bandwidth out of the finite radio spectrum or fibre and copper cables.

Unfortunately, when it comes to fully exploiting all these developments, the human nervous system still remains much as it has been for the last hundred thousand years or so. While the human brain and its circuitry are extremely malleable, they retain certain characteristic limits that have to be recognized in designing systems – especially those that are going to be used in high-stress situations.

At the end of the day – irrespective of how much data we can deliver to the Mark One human eyeball or ear – humans have limited bandwidth. And that bandwidth can drop sharply in the kinds of environments that TETRA users often find themselves in. How best can engineers, device designers, applications developers and operations staff ensure that the maximum human-friendly efficiency is extracted from technologies and systems?

Marshalling a response

The issues at stake are far wider than just ensuring that a fireman can operate his handset with gloves on – or that police officers can access and send appropriate data through theirs without navigating endless menus.

For a start, the complex nature of modern societies demands an increasingly integrated response from the emergency services involved in many incidents. No longer is it enough simply to assign resources from the police, ambulance or fire brigades on a basic triage system of crime, injury or fire and flood.

Not only must these resources be marshalled and dispatched in appropriate ways to handle many different types of incident, but third party resources – even using public networks such as SMS – must be properly integrated with the core TETRA systems and relevant IT applications.

The pace of change

The second major difficulty involves the actual speed of technological change itself and how this impacts on both the individual users and on the organizations involved.

While engineers and marketing people are often keen to add ever more functions, bells and whistles to equipment just because they can – or to differentiate themselves in crowded markets – many of these can remain largely unused. As Steve Jobs famously remarked, ‘The trick with technology is knowing what to leave out, not what to put in’.

In turn, each new interface, application and change requires extensive training to use effectively and this can be both costly and difficult in environments with high staff reassignments and turnovers.

As many companies have recognized in recent years, just engineering alone will not resolve these problems and a multidisciplinary approach is instead required to deal with both product and system design. Motorola Solutions, in particular, places a great emphasis on what it calls ‘High Velocity Human Factors’ – specifically, how humans and machines interact at moments of high stress.

Mental ergonomics

Award-winning designer at Motorola, Bruce Claxton, currently that company’s senior director responsible for design integration, explains: “The last 30 years or so have seen a move away from just looking at basic physical ergonomic issues in handset design to encompass a far wider range of factors and disciplines – from what you might call ‘mental ergonomics’ of structuring interactive menus to applied anthropology and psychology.

“When you have customers relying on your equipment to support them in what one emergency service worker memorably called, ‘a life of boredom interspersed with moments of terror’, then it’s vital that you understand how cognitive performance changes in moments of extreme stress. Fortunately, we now have a range of scientific tools to help us get a better grip of these issues – such as the tunnel vision and stress responses that automatically kick in when even highly trained people are under threat.”

Claxton continues, “In these contexts, it’s also essential to actually send product designers out into the field so that they can fully appreciate the day-to-day realities that emergency staff face, where time to respond very often means the difference between life and death.

“It’s also equally important to get the customers themselves involved in the design process and exploit both deductive and inductive reasoning to maximize the product designer’s creativity. We regularly get groups of users together to do what we call Velcro modelling, where different product features like keypads and displays can joined together in plug-and-play ways to get a feel for an optimum device.
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