A user-centered engineering approach to storage and access in high priority scenarios

This thesis aims at introducing the importance of the application of user-centred ideologies to the redesign and organization of storage spaces in high priority/time-critical industries such as law enforcement and introducing a new area of study that we call “organizational engineering”. Throughout the thesis, the need for this new user-centred area of study was evaluated by carrying out experiments on six sworn officers in the miscellaneous equipment storage rooms at a midwestern law enforcement agency. This involved running the officers through a familiar scenario on the existing system design, redesigning and reorganizing the existing system using a combination of human-centred heuristics and quantitative data collected to develop an optimal design using simulation software; Simio, running the officers on the new system and comparing the data obtained in both cases. The analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data revealed that the new system was more intuitive to use and navigate through, easier to learn for new officers and enhanced greater visibility of the equipment in the room. The data also showed that the newly designed room was consistent with the design of the previous room and reduced the amount of wasted time by 48% and the associated cost by 49%. An ANOVA performed on the amount of wasted indicated a p-value of 0.008 and a paired t-test of the indicated a one-tailed p-value of 0.00033 suggesting the high possibility of a statistically significant difference between the two times. The data thus indicated that such user-centred redesigns could greatly reduce the amount of time devoted to small duties that could greatly hinder the performance of more important tasks. The results obtained from this study indicate a potential to use this approach to storage systems in other high-priority/time-critical industries