Designing for Humans
Designing for Humans
Erin Jacob ’16 is translating needs into solutions
BY JESSICA HALSTEAD
When I heard Erin Jacob ’16 worked in human factors engineering, I took a wild guess at what that meant. Could it be as simple as “building things that make people’s lives easier?” That sounded way too elementary, but it turns out I wasn’t far off. Despite its highly technical name and the complexity that comes with the industry (more on that later), the core of Erin’s work is refreshingly simple—she identifies problems that people have, and builds things that solve those problems.
While a civil engineer might design underground pipes and an environmental engineer might tinker with the exact placement of a wind turbine, human factors engineers build solutions for humans doing things. If you’re a kid with cerebral palsy looking for a typing tool, a human factors engineer can help. If you’re a surgeon at a veterans hospital, bogged down with antiquated paperwork systems, a human factors engineer can help. If you’re a TSA agent spending hours watching the same types of images go by and are worried you might miss something…well, you get the picture.
Technically, Erin works as a design experience specialist at Accenture Federal Services, where she consults on projects for half a year at a time. But beyond “consultant,” Erin thinks of her role as more of a “translator.” “People and organizations we work with don’t have that much of an understanding of their user base before we come in,” she explains. So she does a deep dive into the user’s needs and experiences, and helps her clients—in this role, federal agencies—get really clear on just who they’re serving, and how best to serve them. Then, she builds tech-centered solutions to do just that.
For a recent project, Erin helped healthcare professionals who work with veterans. Veterans can be especially vulnerable to mental health concerns, and the providers’ goal was to reduce veteran suicide rates. But doctors and staff were being weighed down with hours of paperwork at the end of each day. With the user—the doctor—at the center, Erin began the work with a boatload of questions. “I’m trying to understand the doctor, understand everything they do in a day, everything they touch, the patients they see, when they take a lunch break…can they take a lunch break?” she explains. “And what makes them stay at the office longer hours than they need to?”
Once she’s clear on just what the user needs and what problems they’re facing, Erin can build solutions that nip those problems in the bud. In this case, she helped brainstorm design solutions that use AI to automate data reporting for these healthcare providers. With hours saved each day, doctors could see more patients—improving patient outcomes— and then go home at a reasonable time and spend time with their families and friends. For each project, Erin takes on a massive, complicated landscape, like federal healthcare, and meticulously scans for even the tiniest pockets where innovation can occur. Then, she sets the innovation in motion.
Health care is one of Erin’s favorite industries in which to innovate because of its high stakes and big payoff. “You have the potential to transform lives, or save someone from dying because of inefficient technology,” she explains. But being a consultant has allowed Erin to work in various other environments, like when she helped the Department of Education design a website experience for students who were trying to understand different types of financial aid. She’s also worked with TSA to help gamify the mundane task of watching images scroll by on a screen for hours. (And by gamify, I mean considering the use of Xbox controllers to engage with the images and alert colleagues to suspicious items—how’s that for innovation?!)
She spends her days looking for new ways to innovate in a variety of fields, so it’s not a surprise that Erin had a range of academic interests at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes, and then at Tufts. “I probably had 10 favorite classes and 10 favorite teachers,” she explains, laughing. When her advisor asked her what she liked to learn about to help her narrow down a major, her answer ranged from architecture to being outside to niche world history and math topics. “I was all over the place,” she says. “But at the end of the day, building something has always been a big part of it.” Her advisor suggested human factors engineering, promising Erin that her work wouldn’t be limited to one industry. She could lean on her love of history and psychology that she’d honed at SSSAS, and put what she’d learned in one of her favorite classes—Mrs. Geiger’s math class—to use poring over massive data sets. Actually, that math has come in handy lately: “A lot of what I’m doing now is helping various government workers save for retirement, and we have this ginormous AI model and we have to think about probability and all these things,” Erin says. “I’m constantly getting thrown back to that math class.”
The growth of AI has driven innovation in the broader field of tech. But despite its explosive popularity in the private sector, AI tools can still be tricky for federal agencies to use, because of data privacy regulations and the like. “It’s a challenge for many reasons to implement AI in the government landscape,” Erin explains. But over the past five years, she says, the government has become far more innovative when it comes to AI. That’s important when you think about the scale agencies must achieve to have an impact. An example: in occupational therapy classes in college, Erin designed for niche populations, like three kids with cerebral palsy. She focused on improving those three lives specifically. But when she moved to the government space, the scale skyrocketed, and the question became, “How can I design something that genuinely meets the needs of every American citizen?” It seemed like an impossible task. But innovations in AI have helped Erin rise to the challenge. Instead of designing one government webpage for every user, Erin can use AI to customize pages to millions of different users’ needs. “I think it’s really cool to see the new technology coming into a space,” Erin says, “especially when my role is to make technology accessible to everyone and meet everyone’s needs.”
In a field where the term “innovation” is thrown around so freely its meaning can feel blurry, Erin brings it back into focus. Given she’s spent years threading together meaning and enjoyment from a wide array of academic pursuits, it makes sense that her definition of innovation has a similar eclectic quality: “Bringing together the learnings and technology of different industries and implementing it in a new and unique way,” she says. “That’s innovation.”
