http://www.indusbusinessjournal.com/media/paper550/news/2005/06/15/VedicCity/Vedic.Citys.Human.Factors.Tops.12m.170.Employees-959240.shtml
Vedic City's Human Factors tops $12m, 170 employees
By Naomi Grossman
Published: Wednesday, June 15, 2005
MooreFAIRFIELD, Iowa - Vijay More is one of the many who came to Fairfield
in 1987 to be part of a community that practiced Transcendental
Meditation. He got that and a lot more.
Within a year of relocating from California, where he was raised by his
Indian parents, he was working for a small three person-consulting firm,
Human Factors International Inc., which specialized in usability issues.
As the company grew and adapted its usability principles to ever changing
technology, More grew with it.
Today, he is president of Human Factors International, which now has 170
employees and offices all over the world, including in Mumbai and
Bangalore.
The science of making something easy to use is deceptively complicated and
not as intuitive as one would think. It involves an understanding of human
nature, color, graphics and words among other things.
"Some people think its common sense, but much of it is based on more
subtle behavior," said More.
It is also deceptively important. As More pointed out, if a military pilot
has to use an unfamiliar plane and he can't find the gear button, he is in
trouble. A usability expert, said More, would standardize all those
buttons and make the gear button look like a wheel. While Human Factors
International's clients are not flying military missions, they are trying
to keep their companies afloat. The company's client list includes big
names such as The Boeing Co., FedEx Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Development
Co.
These days, the company is focused on institutionalizing usability for
corporations and offers a Web-based software product, consulting services
and training courses to enable users to become certified in fundamental
usability principles. In order to help companies develop continuous
usability, More believes the process has to become more of a factory,
routine-like operation.
"We can now give companies the entire menu of how they can get started in
institutionalizing usability," said More. "The company now has a system to
turn out useable Intranet and Extranet applications. This makes them all
easier to use."
He likens the process to an effort to institutionalize good writing. "You
can edit one piece of writing at a time or you can teach everyone to write
better," he said.
At $48,000, Human Factor's latest product doesn't come cheap, but it does
include templates as well as rules for layout, wording and design among
other things. The company has sold 50 of them since its release nearly
three years ago.
More said Human Factors is also looking to increase its presence overseas,
which now accounts for about 15 percent of the company's $12 million in
revenues.
Two years ago, the company's founder and its chief executive officer, Eric
Schaffer, moved to India to help establish the company's presence there.
The company currently has about 110 employees in India, most of whom
provide support services. More anticipates growing that number to 500,
over the next few years. He said that the company has recently begun to
take on some clients in India.
"When we started going to Asia, usability wasn't there," said More. "IT
was there but the idea of worrying about the poor user wasn't there."
Concern for the user has been Human Factor's focus since its inception. In
the late 1980s, the company worked on redesigning characters and text to
make terminals easier to use. In the early 1990s the focus was on
graphical user interface systems and by the mid 1990s another shift was
made to designing Web sites.
More said that the company managed to keep pace with all the technological
changes in the industry for one reason: human beings have remained the
same.
"[People haven't changed] how they react to color or to wiggly graphics,"
he said. "The basic principles don't change. Short term memory lasts 15
seconds whether it's a green screen, a Web site, a kiosk or a Wall Street
brokerage system."
The same principles apply when the company works with other cultures,
although More said that not everything translates. For example, eye
movement is different in countries that read right to left, leading users
there to process information differently.
These details are crucial because More's goal for his company has become
something of a mission: He said he would like to see Human Factors
International spread usability "all over the world."
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