User Group

PeopleSize refers to the customers or users of a design as a 'user group'. Ergonomics focuses on the needs and characteristics of the user group during the design process, and emphasises the potential for differences between one group of people and another.

Occasionally, a user group may be exactly the same as a group of people who have been measured (or rather, of whom a sample has been measured), such as 'US Males 18-64'. However, more often the user group will be biased towards one gender or certain age groups, and for this reason PeopleSize Professional provides a composite User Group, defined as any mixture of measured groups. This improves design accuracy, helps to focus thinking on the users, and facilitates discussion about percentiles of the actual users of the design.

In PeopleSize Pro the User Group is defined and named in a procedure called User Definition.

PeopleSize aims to offer a wide choice of dimensions and populations, to provide as often as possible an estimate made on an informed and formal basis, rather than simply no data (when the designer is forced to make a guess or find a new source). To do this, measurements collected from one survey at its time and for its population are Estimated for other populations and the present day by scaling.

For more scientific detail about how the data are derived, see Help Data

See also: Adjustments


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