Showcases

what we do all day

Immersive customer archetypes

3D Personas

We visit intuitive 3D personas in their respective homes, communicate important details about the interior and listen to an interview that makes the persona more approachable than ever before.

air-taxis, user-centered

Passenger drone simulator

How should the customer experience of future drone flights be designed? In collaboration with the Ingolstadt University of Applied Sciences, we created a virtual reality experience to address this question. The test persons can experience the entire journey from boarding, drone flight and arrival at the destination terminal.

Munich innovation award

Digitization of the Munich cementeries

The Cemeteries Munich app provides a central information platform for the diverse visitors to the cemeteries. An innovative augmented reality navigation enables efficient and targeted finding of graves and facilitates the search for free grave sites in the context of individual funeral arrangements.

Essays

food for thought

an ai generated image of a man with a colored circle for a head; the titleslide of the presentation

What actually is creativity, and why is it so important?

Creativity - a human factors challenge

by Lorenz Prasch, 15.11.2022

We characterize creativity and its role in the modern workplace. From a shared understanding of what creativity is, we examine the different areas in which human factors/ergonomics can support creative work.

a man in a driving simulator wearing vr goggles

so much more than driving simulators

Virtual Reality in Human Factors Research

by Philipp Maruhn & Lorenz Prasch, 15.07.2022

In human factors research, the term virtual reality (VR) is usually simply equated with simulators, such as flight or driving simulators. But taking a closer look shows that this simple notion should be abandoned.

the need for a taxonomy

Mixed Up Realities

by Philipp Maruhn & Lorenz Prasch, 04.07.2022

The number of private and professional users and manufacturers has exploded in the last decade. And so have the words they use. Reason enough to shed some light on what's what, and what's not.

a brief history

Virtual Reality

by Philipp Maruhn & Lorenz Prasch, 22.06.2022

Even if the latest marketing campaigns would like to convey otherwise, virtual and augmented reality have been around much longer than most people think. Time for a history lesson.

Our methods

what we use, what we're passionate about

XR

Unity, Unreal

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are being used in an increasing number of research and development processes. The high flexibility of these technologies makes them a valuable and versatile tool in the field of rapid prototyping and thus allows user-centered design aspects to be integrated into the development process at an early stage. We use Unity to bring your products to life for your potential users from the very first design concepts. Usability weaknesses can thus be identified and eliminated proactively. We draw on many years of experience in the creation of virtual content for both VR and AR applications. Depending on your needs and research projects, different display technologies can be used. Simple AR and VR applications can be realized on standard smartphones. The use of AR and VR glasses provides additional interaction possibilities.

Usability Engineering

Hard- and Software

Initial user flows and basic dialog design are generally done with pen and paper. This applies to sophisticated digital user interfaces as well as realistic hardware prototypes.

Further implementation then takes place with the close involvement of users. This often happens after initial user tests or feedback sessions with the developed paper prototypes. In the further course of development, we use a wide range of tools that are selected according to the requirements of the specific task. In the past, for example, we developed a novel control concept for cranes, initially in virtual reality and later also as a functional hardware prototype.

Frontend Development

Adobe Suite, Figma, CSS

In addition to scientific expertise, we offer hands-on implementations, not only for study implementation, but also for production environments.

Especially in the areas of UI/UX design, our years of experience with the design of interactive human-machine interfaces come into play, so that we can develop a front-end without lengthy studies and large sample sizes.

Backend Development

JS, Firebase, MongoDB

Consulting on, as well as conception and implementation of suitable architectures in the background of various (web) applications is also part of our program.

Using the latest web-based technologies, we ensure that all data goes where it belongs - and nowhere else. Through relational databases and server-side and client-side programming, we can ensure seamless user interaction, and with it, a consistently positive user experience. After all, even the best UX fails because of lost packets, excessive load times, or insufficient data storage.

Open Science

We support Open Science and can show you how your research project can benefit from it.

Webtechnologies

In a digital world, gaining knowledge is not limited to laboratory experiments. We would be pleased to work with you to implement an online research project.

Responsible research

Ethics

In the field of human factor engineering, the human being is the focus and thus a central part of experiments. We ensure experiments according to ethical guidelines and provide support in obtaining approval from an ethics committee.

Data Analysis

Python and R

We have a wide range of statistical methods at our disposal for the evaluation of quantitative data. In addition to descriptive methods, depending on the research question and data, we apply null hypothesis tests (significance tests and mixed linear models) or Bayesian evaluation techniques.

Ideally, the evaluation methods are already defined before the data collection. This allows you to get an up-to-date picture of your experiment at any time. Following an experiment, we extend the evaluation with further, explorative approaches.

Our Workflow

We practice ISO 9241 not only in the design for end users, but also in the collaboration with our partners. Brief but frequent meetings are the basis for our successful partnership. We ensure that you have a comprehensive insight into the current status of our joint project at all times. We have developed three modules—based on agile methods and design thinking—that serve as the foundation of our work together:

Explore

At the beginning of every project, one aspect is key to us: the people for whom we are developing. Who are they? What are their goals? And in what context will they use your product?

Together with you, we get to know your users and their contexts of use. This results in personas that accompany the entire further research and development process as a living document.

Design

In an iterative, user-centered design process we create prototypes of your future products.

Regardless of whether we jointly develop a prototype or a product already exists, a heuristic evaluation can already identify potential for optimization.

Evaluate

Based on the previous modules, we specify research questions, measurement methods, test persons, and, already in advance, evaluation methods.

We create the experimental environment and finalize the experimental design with iterative preliminary tests. After the experiment, the data is evaluated and the results are presented in a comprehensible way.