Redesign for Ergonomic Office Chair

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Academic Project: Redesign for Ergonomic Office Chair

Course: Fundamentals of Human Centered Computing

Semester: Spring 2015

Prompt: Create an improved design for Herman Miller ergonomic office chair

Team Members: 1

My Roles: user research, interaction design, infographic design, presentation

Subject of Interest: The subject (shown below) to be evaluated is an ergonomic Herman Miller Aeron office chair which was designed to improve the health and well-being of customers. Herman Miller promises to place great importance on design, the environment, community, and innovative ways to improve the performance of their customers' organizations. The price tag for such a chair is between $500 to $600 before tax.

DESIGN PROCESS

Step 1: Heuristic Evaluation

The following heuristic evaluation is based on Don Norman's design principles:

(1) Visibility - The Aeron chair has areas clearly indicating for sitting and the adjustment knobs visible on the side. However, that's all the info that can be found for the chair. According to the website of Herman Miller, the Aeron chair should come with three sizes depending on different body types. There is no sign anywhere about such info. It is a nice feature for user to choose the chair that best fits their body types, but the feature will have the least value if it can ever be found by the user. The improvement suggestion could be lable each chair with the size and refer that to user's manual.

(2) Consistency - Consistent with other chairs, the adjusting knobs are on both sides of the Aeron chair, and that allows the user to navigate the desired functionality easily.

(3) Affordance - Besides the side knobs which have up/down arrow indicating the adjusting functionality, there are also several buttons and knobs on the back of the chair. It is not clear to the user how to use them and what for.

(4) Mapping - There is an object attached to the chair found to be falling on the floor, but the user would have no idea where to put it back because other parts of the chair do not match.

(5) Ergonomic design - As the name indicates, the Aeron chair was designed to provide ergononic comfort to its user. A sample question about the feeling of using the Aeron chair was sent to a group of 10 participants who use the chair every day. Answers returned show that the users do not get the benefits from using the ergonomic chair. They still feel stressed, back pain and shoulder pain after using the chair for a full work day.

(6) Emotional design - The lack of enough ergonomic support causes the user to feel tired, painful, demotivated, and even angry.

Step 2: Brainstorming

An individual brainstorming technique - meditation was used to generate ideas to redesign the ergonomic chair. Besides improving the design that was previously discussed, I have also came up with an idea of a new feature based on my own reflection. Users who have chronic back or shoulder pain should try to stand up from the chair and do body stretches every few hours. It is difficult to remember doing so though unless there is an alarm reminding them frequently. Therefore, I came up with the idea of designing a "Time for Exercise (TFE)" chair. The TFE chair encourages its users to move and stretch their body every two hours using a control panel with digital timer built into the front side of the chair arm, as well as a compact vibration sensor attached underneath the chair. The control panel is wired to the vibration sensor so that it vibrates every two hours starting from the time user sits in the chair.

The "Time for exercise" (TFE) chair - redeisgned for Aeron Ergonomic Chair

● Target user: 1) those who tend to sit on a chair working for a long pepriod of time without changing postures. 2) those who have pre-existing neck, shoulder, spine, leg and back pain but still have to sit at computer or desk for work for hours.

● How does TFE chair work?