During the designing and making processes it is important to gather feedback from the client and users. Refining the product based on this feedback helps solve any problems before production begins.
Primary sources of information are gathered by the designer and used to help improve their designs:
Secondary sources of information use data already found by other people or organisations that are relevant:
Data from questionnaires can be presented visually using graphs, pie charts and tables, making it easier to analyse and summarise. Anthropometric and ergonomic details collected can be averaged out to find the sizes that fit most users. The average measurement percentile is typically the biggest group of users sharing a measurement.
In order to design a new shoe rack for a classroom, it would be useful to know the most common shoe size in the class. To record the data, a combined tally chart and frequency table will need to be produced, as shown below:
Using a tally chart speeds up the process of recording data - the tally is added together to give the frequency. To produce a bar chart of this data, the UK shoe size could go along the x-axis and the frequency along the y-axis:
Below is bar chart of the handspan of students in a class:
Use the bar chart to complete the missing data in frequency table below:
Handspan (mm) | Frequency |
---|---|
100 ≤ × < 110 | |
110 ≤ × < 120 | |
120 ≤ × < 130 | |
130 ≤ × < 140 | |
140 ≤ × < 150 |
Handspan (mm) | Frequency |
---|---|
100 ≤ × < 110 | 3 |
110 ≤ × < 120 | 2 |
120 ≤ × < 130 | 5 |
130 ≤ × < 140 | 4 |
140 ≤ × < 150 | 1 |