Human Factors should not be the only factor

I saw some drafts of new logos for the Arch Lab last week (the Arch Lab is the group of people associated with the Human Factors program at Mason). They all look great, and someone mentioned the human factors of logo design, which got me thinking. Currently, we don’t really have a logo or identity. We have one black-and-white… thing that we don’t have on the web site, thank goodness, and the website header itself is pretty darn boring (click to see the whole site):

The new logo will look up to date, modern, and “academic cool.” I think the designs we have look great, but someone mentioned that the logo also seemed fairly ergonomic - the adjective that means “easily understood/used by people.” I countered that if usability and human factors were the only thing that our logo should be based off of, then our logo should be:

It’s black-on-white, so everyone can read it clearly and easily. It’s even in Helvetica, which is an incredibly popular font for its readability. No flashiness, no graphics, no anything - just readable text. It’s good human factors, but it’s awfully boring.

What’s the lesson? Human factors is important - what good is designing a product if no one can use it (see Cubist Site) But if human factors was the only factor, we’d live in a very boring world full of black-and-white logos, text-based websites, and boxes for cars that only had the bare necessities. It’s good to know that companies have both a design and human factors group. Each group may get frustrated that the other just “doesn’t understand,” but, in the end, you end up with a product that is both pretty to look at and pretty useable.