Safety-critical Interfaces
Regulation and rigour
We often design user experiences (UX) and user interfaces (UI) for clients whose products are used in safety-critical environments. For these high-integrity, highly regulated markets and applications, the user interface is a safety critical element of the product or system.
Typically used in stressful or hazardous situations, often by occasional or even first-time users, the UX and UI for safety products should be simple and intuitive to use and should reassuringly deliver the expected performance in a highly predictable manner. It’s imperative that usability is unambiguous and error-proofed, while the underlying software architecture and code must be rigorously specified, planned, designed and tested against the relevant standards and regulations. Our UX/UI team work with our Human Factors and Usability team to use system-based task analysis and error evaluation to help us ensure that all the product interactions are unambiguous and clearly conveyed to the user.
Safety-critical products are heavily regulated. Working with our clients, our development approach seeks to interpret the relevant regulations at the outset to extract clear measurable design requirements. These requirements help us to highlight the key risks in the project, which in turn determine how we plan and manage the development programme. The resulting project plan will include focused risk reduction and risk mitigation activities early in the programme and will incorporate activities for the creation of materials and documentation to support the regulatory testing and approval of representative manufactured products ahead of the market launch.
Designing for different safety-critical sectors
We design experiences and interfaces for a wide range of safety-critical environments including the medical, industrial and transport sectors. Our work covers products and systems from ship positioning systems to simulator flight decks, industrial PPE respiratory systems to medical devices. To deliver work across such a diverse range of products, systems and platforms we have developed our own suite of tools that enable us to develop context-appropriate graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in a structured manner but with flexibility and agility.
Our development procedures are certified to ISO 13485 and aligned with IEC 62304, ISO 14971, IEC 62366 and 21CFR820, which supports our work in designing medical devices. This allows us to tackle the development of even the most complex and innovative experiences, UI and systems with confidence and capability.
In our work in the transport sector, we have developed ground-breaking processes for undertaking Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) and glare studies as part of the UI design and HF assessment of driver’s desks and cabs. The quality of our work and our interactive use of rigs, models and mock-ups of increasing fidelity through the design process was recognised by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in America who presented us with their User-Centred Product Design Award for the Class 800 cab.
Helping our clients achieve success through great product design
