Visualization of Ergonomic Guidelines – Development and Evaluation of Prototypes

This study attempts to discover how ergonomic guidelines should be visualized in order to make it easier and more interesting to find and interpret the guidelines throughout the construction process. A prototype, visualizing ergonomic guidelines on the intranet, has been developed and evaluated at a company that produces cars for the global market. The results show that the visualization of ergonomic guidelines should preferably be based on a picture of the physical car with hyperlinked segments easy to relate to a group of guidelines or a specific guideline. The specific ergonomic guidelines should preferably have the dimensions illustrated in pictures, with body parts showing dimensional relations and how the details are to be used. Animations makes it easier to understand the usage of details and dimensional relations; it also makes the presentation more fun.