Resumen de Influencing Social Problems with Interface Design

Catherine Burns, Pascale Proulx

• HUMAN FACTORS/ERGONOMICS PRACTITIONERS ARE often challenged to apply their knowledge to solve social problems (e.g., Moray, 1994; Vicente, 1998). Regrettably, the opportunities to do so are relatively rare. Such opportunities need to be taken advantage of when they arise.

  This article describes one such project, which was carried out as a student interface design project in a senior undergraduate course on interface design at the University of Waterloo. In this course, students define a problem of interest, develop an ecological interface design (or EID, described later) for the problem, and proceed through a user testing exercise. This process provides a snapshot of a realistic design process within the constrained time of an academic term (three months). The second author was a student in this course, and the following article describes her course project on applying ecological interface design to reduce problem gambling (Proulx, 2000).